Expecto Nothing, Except Everything
by letschangetheworld
Summary: A tale in which Lily discovers her Patronus and love, but has one hell of a time announcing and proving both. You would too if your boyfriend was everything and anything but attentive.
1. Doe, A Deer, A Female Deer

Okay, this tiny little plot sort of sprouted into my head when I was playing an intense soccer game, which we happened to win. I find that very strange because normally in a game, I fail to think about anything other than scoring and generally kicking ass, you know?

I'm thinking at least 5-7 chapters, but at this point, I'm not entirely sure how this'll turn out. Reviews are warmly welcomed and greatly advised because they make me want to write more!

_Disclaimer: everything remains in the grasp of the always wonderful J.K. Rowling._

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**Chapter 1 – Doe, A Deer, A Female Deer**

I read "sorry, try again" off the inside of a muggle bottle cap; story of my life.

Maybe next time, you did your best, at least you tried.

All these things are supposed to make me feel better, but it just reminds me that no matter how hard I try, how I gave it my all, I fail.

When I got on a broom in 1st year, I did an impressive roll that ended up resulting in a sprained wrist. _Sorry, try again_. I have not sat down on a broom since and nor will I, well, ever.

My first potions class ever ended up being a disaster. It's a lucky thing I survived the humiliating ten minute walk to the hospital wing to re-grow my eyebrows. _Sorry, try again_.

I had a boyfriend for most of the summer before 6th year and a week before I left for Hogwarts, he approached me one day and simply told me that there was somebody else and that this had been 'fun'. _Sorry, try again_.

It's my final year here at Hogwarts and I'm terribly afraid of stepping out into the real world and seeing it flash across everything, every situation I find myself coming upon: _sorry, try again, sorry, try again, sorry, try again_.

"Am I interrupting?"

I lower my wand warily, cursing the day I gave Alice the password to the Head Tower. I only did it in retaliation because I had walked in one day to find James' fellow Marauders – Sirius, Remus and pudgy Peter – sprawled out on one of our couches waiting patiently for him to get back from tutoring. James had told them the password, so why couldn't I tell Alice?

The answer to that question was simple – that would mean Alice could barge in and be pesky in my life when sometimes I really, _really_ wanted to be alone.

"I guess not," I say leisurely, even though she is. "I'm practicing 'Expecto Patronum'. Once again, my life sucks and I can't get it right."

"Lily," Alice begins fairly, tilting her head as I swish my wand this way and that, producing sparks, "you're brilliant at Charms."

"True, but this is Defense Against the Dark Arts. I'm not so into defense or the Dark Arts, so naturally, I fail."

She looks at me blankly, summing me up. "Ahhh," Alice says suddenly, holding up her index finger smartly. "You're going through another bout of self-loathing!"

That's not exactly what I would call it.

"Frustration! Self-_frustration_!"

Alice crosses the room and sits down primly on my bed, crossing her legs and linking her hands in front of one knee. "Alright, well, show me yours."

"What's that saying; I'll show you mine if you show me yours? I already told that fifth year Ravenclaw, I'm taken and as straight as a – "

"Lily!" Alice interjects, flapping her hands at me to stop. "Your Patronus! Show me your bloody _Patronus_."

"Oh." I blush, fiddling with my wand before straightening up slightly and pointing my wand directly at my dresser. What it did, I'm not sure, but it's been the subject of my wrath for nearly every spell I've needed to practice in private.

"Expecto Patronum!"

For a moment, there's a tuft of silvery smoke from the tip of my wand but it pathetically disappears not a moment later. I glare at my dresser – because it's there and I need something to direct my frustration at – as Alice remains quiet on my bed.

I suck. I suck brutally.

"What happy memory are you thinking of?"

I look down at my fingers which are loosely grasping my wand, my chipped off and angular nail polish seriously neglected which reminds me to do them later tonight. "Petunia and I used to go to this playground when we were little, and I'd start swinging and then I'd let myself leap off and I'd glide through the air. The feeling I got when doing that – I'm using that."

Alice is silent for another moment and I take that time to filter through my nail polish collection in my head to find a suitable color. I know I should care more than I'm not mastering this charm, this rather useful spell that could come in handy during these hectic times in the wizarding world. But really, if I ever come face to face with a Dementor, I'm pretty sure I'd be too busy shatting my knickers to remember my wand is within reach.

"Is this the same park that Severus snuck up on you at?"

I blink, looking up at her. She stares back.

"Well… yeah. Are you going to say something about how subconsciously the memory isn't really a good one because it has to do with Snape and I've had a rough past with him and I hate his guts now and all that?" I ask tiredly, seeing the gaping holes in my so-called 'happy memory'.

I guess I never really thought hard about the real meaning of the memory and how it relates to life _now_.

Snape and I haven't spoken in years and he's chillin' with the future Death Eaters and I could care less about him now and the moments we had together in the past… except I sort of miss having that best friend relationship. Alice and I are extremely good friends and I can and will tell her anything and everything, but with Sev it was different. He seemed to understand better.

Maybe because he felt like an outcast in this world too.

"I don't know whether I would have said it so... bluntly, but yes."

I try several more times, searching my mental file cabinet for memories that evoke happiness and warmth and a general feel-good sort of sensation.

Getting my acceptance letter, seeing Hogwarts approaching in the distance for the first time, getting recognition from Professor Slughorn in front of the entire class (which included those slimy Syltherins), befriending Alice, exploring Hogsmeade for the first time, learning I was going to Head Girl, falling in love, seeing James conducting a Quidditch practice with ease, kissing him in an alcove when we're really supposed to be patrolling, the feeling of his glasses against my cheek, the comfort of being wrapped in his arms… _James_.

He's made things so much more trouble-free. Whenever I get stressed about exams or the future or _our_ future, he leaps over any objects between us and gathers me in his arms and presses kisses to my face, telling me that everything would be fine, he'd be there, we were going to be okay.

Just being with him is easy, the way we are so used to each other now. His friends, my friends, it's all the same now. We're together and I berate myself for not searching through the thickness and mischief in our earlier years; maybe, just maybe, there had been something there that wasn't visible to me.

And then it comes to me just as easily as the whole 'being together' thing. The answer to my Patronus predicament, the answer to the question I have been asking myself at night when I can't sleep, when I can't think of anything but James and those devilishly good looks and his wild, soft hair that I love to run my fingers in and mess up even more.

"Lily?"

I see Alice start to rise off my bed, a worried expression on her round face, but I shake my head simply at her. I'm okay, better than okay. So much more than okay.

I'm in love.

Heart thumping madly in my chest and the certain sensation that I'm about to keel over in a dead faint, I raise my wand again and close my eyes tightly. Everything James is flooding my head; the way he smiles at me from across a classroom, his wink, the concern in those hazel eyes when he knows – just _knows_ – that something's wrong, his confidence, his delightful humor and how it makes me laugh endlessly, his lips…

"Expecto Patronum!" I shout with confidence, vigor, almost excitement.

The burst of light that erupts from the tip of my wand make the sun's rays look pitiful; I hear Alice shriek a little as I laugh, just laugh, shielding my eyes slightly as they try to focus on the moving light that is forming, becoming something, my Patronus.

It's a doe, gleaming and curious right there in the middle of my bedroom. She's beautiful, the way her head turns slightly at the sound of Alice scrambling up into a seated position, those big lashes that flutter when she blinks in my direction, locking her gaze with mine. I inhale sharply, amazed and yet perplexed at the same time.

We stare at eachother for some time and it's surreal to know that in some sense, that is a part of me, a piece of my soul, my identity, my personality.

"Lily." Alice's voice is wobbly and I take my eyes momentarily off my Patronus to see her smiling widely. "Do you know what this means?"

"I think so," I answer optimistically, watching the doe for another second before I sigh. "Thinking about _him_ caused _that_ to happen." I gesture to the glimmering animal that seems to be evaporating before our eyes. Soon enough, the doe disappears, fades away, leaving my vision spotty.

Alice rises to her feet, walking straight up to me and grasping my upper arms tightly in her hands. "Lily Evans, do you realize – "

"Merlin's beard, Alice, I know," I say crossly, rolling my eyes. "I _know_."

"Well then go, you barmy woman, go!"

--

_His practice has to be near finish_, my mind reasons with me after producing my Patronus ten times just so that I know I can do it.

As I traipsed down the staircase and through the cozier, smaller version of the Gryffindor common room, I hurdle a stacked pile of pillows that seemed to have formed some sort of fort. Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew, I am going to mutilate the both of you tomorrow.

"Lily? Where are you going?"

I blow past Remus, who looks just as bewildered as the rest of the students I've sped past.

"Can't talk, Lupin!" I call back energetically, waving at him. "I've got something I need to do!"

I jump down the remainder of the staircase – five stairs jumped, a new record for me – and bolt my way through the entrance hall until I slam shoulders into somebody by pure accident, but realizing who exactly I've run into it doesn't seem like such a big deal anymore. My apology is lost somewhere in my throat.

"Christ, Mrs. Potter, you nearly ran me straight over. I see the headline tomorrow morning, whispers traveling across the Great Hall at breakfast – Sirius Black run over my bulldozer Lily Evans, killed instantly, resembles pancake – can you imagine the mayhem?"

"The only people who would care are your little fan club, Black," I bite back, smiling in satisfaction. "Now move," I command, pushing past him roughly causing him to give an outcry in protest. "Oh shove it; I have more important things on my mind. Me trampling on your big toe comes last."

I can still hear him swearing and shouting after me, but it blends into what Joelle is saying as I run past her.

"LILY! LILY, I NEED YOU TO LOOK OVER THE GRADUATION CEREMONY SEATING PLANS… _LILY!_"

Can these people not bloody realize that I am in no mood, no mood AT ALL, to communicate with them? Generally when somebody rushes past you at top speed it's because they have somewhere to be and generally you understand and _don't get in the way_.

Holy moly, who knew the Quidditch pitch was so far away?

There are some figures zooming around in the air above the pitch, I can see them clearly through the early evening light, but some are also leaving the pitch through the opening.

I can _so_ imagine James punishing members of his team who were lazy and didn't seem to care that the championship is in exactly a week. I am willing to bet my own wand that those are the kids doing lap after lap against the sky backdrop.

"Evans!"

I turn to see a girl – 6th year, Mary? Cassie? – exiting the pitch with another boy, Marcus, I think.

"Yes?" I call back, slowing down just slightly because she seems to look slightly exasperated.

"Please don't go in there. You distract the poor guy enough during the day; let him conduct the rest of his practice in peace."

I sputter for a moment, "That's – I – what are you… I'm not going to distract him!"

They both roll their eyes – shove it, 6th years, or I'll hex you – and carry on their own business, walking off into the darkness towards the lit castle.

How dare they think I'm a distraction to their captain!

Alright, I'll come clean – last time I watched a practice from the stands with Alice and the other Marauders, James seemed a little flustered (which I found endearing as hell) and occasionally _did_ end up landing in the stands to give me a quick kiss every now and then.

Twenty three times. Peter counted.

I tiptoe through the overhang of the entrance to the pitch, moving towards the opening that leads out to the vast plane of grass. I can hear James yelling – "GIVE ME MORE ATTITUDE AND ANOTHER TWENTY LAPS, ARMSTRONG" – and the occasional _whoosh_ of somebody flying directly overhead.

I find myself a comfortable, seated position against the wall next to what I know is the boy's locker room. The only time I recall being in there, much fondling and giggling and activities other than Quidditch preparations were going on. Minutes wear on and ludicrously enough, I'm beginning to think it's been an hour before I hear James' voice clear and loud through the night.

"Alright, you gits, pack it in."

There's a universal hullabaloo of happiness as I hear the sounds of several feet landing on the grass just off to my right, out of sight. I come to the humorous conclusion that I must look ridiculous, sitting there half slouched towards the ground, so I rise gingerly to my feet and linger near the door.

Boys and girls alike come trooping in, swearing at James under their breath. The two girls (4th and 7th years, Sarah and Amy, respectively) don't notice me and bang their way through to the girl's locker room, while four boys walk by within inches of me. All four notice me but only one hangs around in the doorway for a moment.

"He's real grouchy," he tells me, casting a glance at the opening out onto the pitch.

Suddenly this doesn't seem like it's going to turn out like the spectacle I've been trying to make it out to be. Maybe I should just wait until he goes back up into the tower himself; maybe he'll be a little more relaxed.

"Grouchy enough to bite everybody and everything's head off no matter who or what they are?" I ask in a hushed tone, sharing the same apprehensive look as the boy standing near me.

"Probably." He shrugs and follows his friends into the locker room, the door swinging closed behind him and I hear the sounds of metal doors being slammed and showers being started.

_Sorry, try again. Sorry, try again. Sorry, try again_.

They're flashing through my head like those electronic neon signs on the sides of roads where they tell you to slow down because construction is going on ahead of you.

What if – what if – what if… oh _god_. Preposterously enough, I can't help but begin to think that my declaration won't be warmly accepted. And that would _seriously_ crush me.

I wait a moment to see if James comes in after his team, but I hear _whoosh_ing sounds and frown. He's flying out there by himself, which means only one thing: James William Potter is in no mood to hear anything significant.

His best mates could be bleeding half to death in the hospital wing, but if James Potter is flying around the pitch by himself, _you do not disturb him_.

My ego and confidence completely deflated, I creep along the wall until I'm outside the stadium, walking up the path back to the school, reasoning with myself that he's just got a lot on his plate and having a pesky girlfriend wanting to tell him something important – which he would probably think can't be more significant than the Quidditch championship game – would just add more to the aforementioned plate.

And I don't want to be pesky.

No longer sprinting across the grounds at the speed of light, I find myself leisurely approaching the stairs to see Sirius and Remus sitting on them, chatting away merrily until their eyes fall upon me. I probably look down-trodden and have the expression appropriate of having a close relative die unexpectedly.

"I thought you had something to do!"

I sigh and join them on the steps, leaning back on one higher and resting my elbows there. "I did, but I think it can wait a while."

Sirius leans over a little, eyebrows doing a little dance on his forehead. I know its coming and I'm not terribly surprised when he whispers, "Alice told us!"

"That woman can't keep a thing to herself, honestly," I complain.

"You mastered the Patronus charm, it's hardly scandalous or anything," Remus tells me, looking at me weirdly as I blink back slowly.

Thank you, Alice, _thank you_. Apparently she's simply told them that I have mastered it and kept secret that my Patronus happened to be a doe, which coincides nicely with not only James' Animagus form, but his Patronus as well.

We sit there, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, in silence, admiring the calm of the night and the stars and everything, simply everything. The way the grass slopes down towards the shores of the lake, and the way you can just see an outline on the surface, the outline of the squid, lazily tossing and flapping his or hers or its tentacles. The way the moon peeks out from the trees of the forbidden forest and the way the light from the entrance hall floods the stairs and a short distance onto the grass.

I come to the definite conclusion that I don't want to be here when James storms back up the path from the pitch. I don't want to witness that.

"Well, _ladies_," I begin, lifting my elbows off the steps and clambering to my feet. "It's nearly ten o'clock and I'm bushed and tomorrow's Hogsmeade."

"Ah yes, James mentioned taking you to Hogsmeade tomorrow instead of letting Alice whisk you away."

I smile briefly, glancing off towards the pitch which is barely distinguishable now in the dark.

"Whisk me away, huh?" I repeat, but in my head, I can't help but add, 'James has already done that'.

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So? So? So? What do you think? Constructive criticism, if anything, please. Update should come soon!


	2. Hogsmeade & Weird James

Thaaaank you for the support. I would especially like to thank the following reviewers: _pippapear_,_ xshrimpyx_,_ lori-loo_,_ AdelphaHighbrow (_what are you, psychic? I was going to have Snapeypoo make am appearance),_ greeneyeddancer21_,_ TaylorxxSue_, and _Saltwater Insomniac!_

I realllllyy appreciate it. Alright, on with the story.

_Disclaimer: Natta is mine, unfortunately_.

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**Chapter 2 – Hogsmeade & Weird James**

_"James, I want you to stop."_

_"Stop what?" James asks innocently, looking down at me with the roundest of eyes, bouncing our newborn in his arms._

_We are standing in the middle of our child's bedroom – a soft green, a green that James was adamant had no resemblance to the Syltherin green in Hogwarts, with white baby furniture and a dark wood rocking chair, positioned in front of the bay window, overlooking the backyard – attempting to put our baby to bed for the night._

_"Stop fighting," I stress to him, clutching his arm tightly, trying to convey my frustration and worry in ways that simple words cannot._

_James sighs through his nose, looking away from me, still cradling the now drowsy child to his chest. "You know I can't do that, this is what I have to do. I need to make this a better world for our family and – "_

_"There's no use in doing that, because if and when the world becomes a 'better place', you won't be in it!"_

_"Lily," James pleads, shooting me down with a look before crossing the carpet and laying our infant down._

_I stand where I am, folding my arms across my chest, watching him reverently because somehow, someway, I think this must be the last time I'll be seeing him do this. _

_We leave the room, closing the door half way before turning to each other in the hallway, dim with moonlight. _

_"Please," I beg, shutting my eyes._

_I feel his lips against my forehead, and he whispers against my skin, "I'll be back."_

"Lillian Paige Marie Evans, you are going to miss the last Hogsmeade trip if you don't get your hinny out of bed right now!"

My eyes open immediately with a twitch to see Alice and Joelle leaning over my bed, squinting down at me with expressions of utmost aggravation. I don't think I've ever woken to a stranger sight.

Both girls relax instantly seeing I'm awake now and scramble off of me onto the floor. "Took you bloody long enough, everybody left an hour ago, including your boy-toy," Joelle moans, leaning against my trunk lazily.

"Why didn't James come get me?" I ask to nobody in particular, throwing my sheets away and crawling to the end of my bed, jumping off and making my way around strewn clothes and textbooks and rolls of blank parchment to the bathroom.

"He said he'd wait around for you in Hogsmeade," Alice answers slowly and I can feel her eyes on my back as I walk into the bathroom.

She must want to know what went down at the stadium last night after my fabulous Patronus and realization, but I can't bring myself to tell her at the moment, so I shut the door and start the shower, trying to listen through the wood to see if they leave. I don't hear anything, anything at all.

I step underneath the warm jets of water, allowing them to beat down on my shoulders before I lather up my hair and wash it through. I don't know what the dream meant. Hell, I don't know whether it was supposed to even mean _anything_. Perhaps I was tired. But the heartbreak that I somehow seemed to feel, it was crushing. I close my eyes and turn my face up to the steam, thinking.

James Potter, what have you done to me?

After showering and drying myself off, I leave the bathroom with a towel wrapped tightly around my torso and do indeed find both girls sprawled out on my bed, talking.

"Although you sticking around to escort me to Hogsmeade is very endearing and I adore you two very much," I begin, crossing the room to my trunk, "don't you have boyfriends to be scouring the village with?"

Joelle scowls at me (her last relationship was the previous year and with Sirius Black; like most of his affairs, it ended quite unfortunately) but Alice merely shrugs. "Frank joined James and the rest of the boys."

"Longbottom might as well become the fifth Marauder," I say calmly, but I know that if I suggest that to James he would certainly have a fit.

I find myself some clothes to throw on after taking a moment to open my window to see how warm it is on this June afternoon. After grabbing some coins and shoving them in my back pocket, I turn to the girls and smile, though its somewhat forced.

The school is virtually vacant – and by vacant I mean excluding the first and second years who when we pass by them, look frightened as though we're going to whip out our wands and curse them into the next decade – and we make our way down onto the grounds in near silence, following the path towards the village.

By near silence, I mean every so often Alice clears her throat in a painfully obvious sort of way. Finally, after she does it for the fourteenth time down by Hagrid's hut, Joelle snaps.

"Do you want us to reach into your throat to help _dislodge_ whatever _the hell_ is in there?"

Alice responds maturely, sticking out her tongue at Joelle with an accompanied sneer. "No," she snaps and then suddenly her wrath is directed at me. What the heck did I do?

"Did you tell James about your Patronus?"

"Woah, woah," Jo says quickly, undoubtedly wanting to backtrack so that she can follow the conversation successfully.

I look wearily between the two. "My Patronus is a doe," I reluctantly disclose, ignoring the sharp intake of breath from Joelle beside me. "Which as you can probably figure out, means only one thing."

"Lily is in love."

I sigh. "I think she's grasped the impact of the situation, Alice."

Joelle is silent for a moment, before it clear across her face: she's figured out why I blasted past her last night. "You ignored me yesterday because you were going to tell James!"

"_Going to_ – "

"Alice!" I hiss, before nodding at the dark haired girl on my other side. "It didn't work out. I will though, he's just… bogged down at the moment."

"When?" Joelle asks excitedly. I already see it in her eyes.

"You're not going to _stalk _me and James so you can witness 'the moment', are you?" I ask dreadfully.

Flustered and blushing, Joelle glowers at me as we approach the wrought-iron gates leading into the village.

"I wasn't previously planning on it," she mutters, even though that's a lie and we both know it. "But perhaps I will now!"

Hogsmeade, as always, is jam-packed with students and stragglers. The village has always been one of my favorite parts of coming to school, being able to come out and just relax; find myself some chocolate and sit down to have a butterbeer in The Three Broomsticks.

But Alice and Joelle are hell-bent on finding the Marauders, probably so that they can help the declaration-of-love progress.

I really didn't plan on doing here. How appalling would that be?

_James, I love you… but excuse me while I scoot away from the embarrassing drunkard beside me who is trying to feel me up_.

"Gladrags Wizardwear?"

"Heavens, no," Joelle dismisses, standing on her toes to look over the sea of students before us. "Scrivenshaft's Quill Shop?"

"Why in God's name would the Marauders go somewhere with school products?"

"Alright, Ms. I Know Everything, do tell us where they went."

Is it such a surprise that I foresee a pounding headache in my near future?

"Look," I begin, catching the attention of both girls as they continue to list possible places the Marauders and Frank could be. "I'm going to Honeydukes. I don't care what you two do, go search every goddamn shop for all I – "

"Oh!" Alice cuts in suddenly, slapping a hand to her forehead to further express her denseness. "Zonko's! Why didn't we think of that _first_…"

I feared they would come to more likely choice while I was still in their presence. Very unenthusiastically, I allow them to lead the way down the correct path towards the joke shop, the apple of the Marauders' eyes. I'm quite certain the owner will eventually bestow the entire establishment to my boyfriend and his chums – they're like his long lost _sons_ – and in the future, if there is one (_your dream certainly believed there was one_, my mind taunts) I will be forced to enter the shop and ask my boyfriend, fiancé, husband, which ever, when he is returning home from 'work'.

If you can even call running a _joke shop_ work.

"Mrs. Potter! Walker! Mrs. Longbottom!"

I hear Joelle growl out something under her breath beside me and even without hearing the voice, I can assume who she's grumbling about. The subject of her wrath, the subject of my constant irritation.

Sirius sidles up to us, lazily licking a lollipop he probably purchased at Honeydukes – my favorite store, by far, which makes me green with envy – and smiling smugly at us like we've stepped in something awful on the way here.

"Glad to see you've managed to come into the sun, Evans," he says cheerfully. "We just got here, care to join us?" He motions behind him at the shop as Joelle and Alice brush by, the former conspicuously knocking shoulders with him.

"Bloody hell, you end things with a girl and suddenly she's out to get you," Sirius grumbles, turning and accompanying me to the door of the joke shop.

An incredibly infuriating jingle goes off as Sirius holds it open for me, manners making a rare appearance, albeit the appearances are always brief. My eyes are assaulted by bright colors, whizzing and twirling this way and that, and it takes me a moment to see ceiling-high shelves stacked with products of varying sizes.

Naturally, the next thing I spot is a head of chaotic black hair, visible in between boxes and jars. Sirius ambles off towards Frank, Remus and Alice – "Loggybottoms, quit kissing, it hurts my eyes!" – as I peek around the shelf unit, smiling.

James is kneeling down, shifting through the things on the second row, brow knitted in concentration. I marvel at him for a second more, the doe from last night flickering across my mind, bringing butterflies to my stomach, before I clear my throat. He starts, nearly loosing his balance on his knees, looking up to see me.

"I was wondering where you were," he says smoothly after recovering, climbing to his feet holding a jar in his hand.

I move closer and try to see the label on the jar but it's against his palm, hidden. "I just slept in, s'all."

"You never sleep in on Hogsmeade days," James contradicts, as his smile fades just slightly. "Are you tired? Do you want me to step it up a bit more? I'm sorry, it's just with Quidditch practice and NEWTS and tutoring – "

I silence him the only way that seems to work 100 in every situation where he's babbling nonsense to me – I plant a big kiss on his lips, and predictably, he slips the jar back onto the shelf so his hands can slide around my waist snugly.

"_Moooooony_, please remind me why we hang out with couples?"

"Because Padfoot, they're our friends," Remus answers from the aisle next to us as James and I unwillingly, very unwillingly, detach ourselves from each other and spot Sirius lingering in the aisle.

He pulls a face and crosses his arms over his chest. "I want to go to The Three Broomstick's for some butterbeer," he announces to the shop, expecting the rest of us to immediately obey his wishes like good little puppies. When all he receives is silence, Sirius' eyes narrow.

Remus appears by his side, exasperated. "Frank and Alice left a few minutes ago," he tells Sirius offhandedly, glancing down the aisle at James and I, "and clearly those two don't want anything to do with us right now, as you can probably guess by the way Lily is swaddled up to James like a newborn – " I blush crimson at this as James smirks, " – so why don't you, me and Joelle go get your butterbeer."

"Yeah, like hell I will," complains Jo from the front of the store somewhere. "I'll catch up with you later, Lily. Have fun!" There's that annoying jingle briefly before the door slams shut.

"I have the distinct feeling she hates my very existence," murmurs Sirius sadly.

I shyly clasp James' hand in mine. "Why don't you take me to Honeydukes?" I ask amiably, battling my eyelashes up at him, Evans charm in full bloom.

James crumbles at once. It's truly astonishing how I have that effect on the poor guy. "Right," he says, nodding and leading me down the aisle, past Remus and Sirius.

"Merlin help you, Prongs, because we no longer can," Black calls after us, his tone mournful as if James has the plague or something. "She's got your claws in you far too deep."

I want to shout a retort back at him, but the door already closes behind him and it would be lost in the wood. "He's got some nerve," I observe, looking up at James to see him glancing over his shoulder. "What?"

He peeks down at me, momentarily disoriented. "What?" It catches up to him that I've just asked him the same thing, and he shakes his head. "Oh, nothing. Just looking around."

"Are you okay?"

This should be a simple question for him to answer; it's either a yes or a no. There's no maybes or perhaps, just two straightforward possible answers.

"I don't know."

He doesn't know? Blimey, how can you not whether you're okay?

"What?" I stupidly ask, before adding quickly, "What do you mean?"

James shrugs and I feel him intertwine our fingers – James, Lily, James, Lily, James, Lily – while staring off into space. "What do you think is going to happen when… you know…?"

"Happen when? Where?"

My heart speeds up. Is he talking about our future? Oh, God. He doesn't think there is a future. I am experiencing a panic attack, what the hell am I going to do, he's going to break –

"When we face Sytherin in the championship."

Excuse the language, but what the FUCK.

"The… Quidditch… game…" I struggle to find some sense of mental balance while still reeling that he's even asked me this.

Voldemort is high in power and his followers are all around us and in a week we're graduating for God's sake, but the man asks me what I think about his stupid Quidditch game.

Unbelievable.

"I don't know," I mutter back halfheartedly. "You'll win?"

"Hopefully," James agrees, now smiling at me as I try to do it back. "Ah, here we are, Ms. Evans." He opens the door to Honeydukes for me. My desire for chocolate has scaled three-fold now.

"Thanks," I reply, walking in and inhaling the sugary, lovely smell of chocolate and candies and everything sweet.

I meander over to a display, picking up an unreasonably large bar of chocolate and twisting it around to look at the price. I expect James to be wandering around as well and it's a shock to see him out of the corner of my eye, standing where we came in, hands deep in his pockets.

"James?"

He looks round at me and smiles, bringing a slight blush to my cheeks as always, my prickliness at him withering away. "Help me choose," I tell him, beckoning him over.

As he comes over, examining the bar of chocolate and sliding an arm around my waist, I can't help but inwardly grin and yet grimace. Why is dating James suddenly so... tiresome?

There's so obviously something on his mind but when he's concerned over something, it's more than likely that the only thing to learn about it will be his pillow or his broom. James isn't interested in opening up, unsurprisingly like most guys.

Though… there is always the chance that he happened to reveal his concern to a certain troublesome berk by the name of Sirius Black.

--

"Where's Alice again?"

"Snogging Frank in some linen closet. Buck up, Jo, you _did_ say you were bored…"

"Not bored enough to talk to _him_!"

I count to ten mentally before following Joelle's nasty gaze and frantic gestures across the Gryffindor common room at the back of Sirius Black's head, bent over something in his lap.

"Alright, you know what, that was a YEAR ago. Don't you think you can lighten up a smidgen to be able to be in the same vicinity as the guy?"

Joelle stared at me for a moment before bluntly whispering, "No."

I nibble at my lower lip for a moment before standing up and grabbing Joelle's sleeve at the same time, tugging. "Please? I'll do your Charms homework that I _know_ you haven't started," I sing in temptation.

She's torn between a rock and a hard place; talk to her ex-boyfriend or face the rage of a very betrayed friend. Finally, Joelle sighs and nods slowly, allowing herself to be pulled off the chair now.

"Excellent. It won't be that bed," I declare enthusiastically. "Oy! Black!"

Head snapping up at the sound of his surname, Sirius' eyes widen when he comes upon the sight of Joelle and I standing in front of him. My hands are on my hips and I've taken the position appropriate of being angry, but Joelle is the total opposite, wringing her hands and looking everywhere _but_ at him.

"I have a bone to pick with you, Mr. Black," I say calmly now, sliding myself onto the couch next to him. Joelle scrambles onto the other side of me and I come upon the _craaaazy _conclusion that she won't be much help.

"Which bone would that be?" Sirius tries to inconspicuously hide his PlayWizard magazine under a nearby pillow but I confiscate it without a moment's hesitation.

I scrutinize the front cover. "Really, Black. You need to get off on these things?"

"It's James', I'll have you know."

Shit, maybe this was a really poor idea. I hear Joelle snort beside me in disbelief and elbow her briefly somewhere, which is followed by a low moan – I have a feeling it was near her chest – before addressing the boy in front of me again.

"Tell me what's wrong with James or I'll scorch off your man part."

Sirius looks completely baffled and instinctively crosses his arms over his lap. "What's… wrong with James? Why do you think I bloody know?"

"Oh, please, Sirius. You're his best mate. You've probably shared first-time stories and drinking stories and which girl puts out on the first date – "

"Bloody hell, Evans," Sirius laughs suddenly, so elatedly that he ends up slapping his knee in his own little world of mirth. "James has only ever cared about one girl, why do you think he would wonder let alone care about the rest of them? Are you failing to recall the many times he followed you around like a sad, pathetic pet?"

I shift uncomfortably on the couch, Joelle eerily silent on my other side. "I remember," I bite back sulkily. "But seriously, Sirius – " I hold up a hand to stop his joke before he can even open his mouth, " – what's wrong with my boyfriend?"

He stares at me for another few moments, before taking a deep breath and looking around cautiously. "This firmly goes against the rules of Maraudership and… well, the unspoken rules of being best mates."

"For God's sake, Black…"

"I'm sorry," Sirius blurts out abruptly, shaking his head so fast it's like a blur of facial parts. "I can't… I can't do that to him. He's my best mate," he stresses to us, both of us, looking briefly over my shoulder at Joelle's face. I can't see her but she's probably a brilliant flaming red right now, feeling the extent of Sirius' words.

"He won't tell me, will he?" I ask quietly, but it's as if I already know the answer to it.

"No. Not right now," Sirius reveals regretfully. "But he will, no doubt about it. Just… just let him be, okay? He's got – "

" – a lot on his plate right now," I finish for him, before taking a deep breath and nodding. "Fine. But if I were to tell you something, something secretive, would you automatically tell James?"

Sirius sums me up for a second, hesitant, before he relaxes.

"Look, I may piss you off a great deal, but it's because you're sort of like the little sister I never had," he says, bringing a smile to my face which causes him to scowl. "Don't tell anybody that."

"I won't." We get up and just as I'm about to walk over to the portrait to leave through, my judgment gets tossed into the air.

"Sirius?"

"Yes, Evans?"

"My Patronus is a doe."

He stares at me over the back of the couch, eyes wide and unblinking. Then, he smiles, a slow smile that spreads across his entire face and somehow, someway, brings a sort of warmth to me, a sort of sensation that even though James is fretting over something, _it'll be okay_.

"Whenever _you _tell him that, he'll be mighty pleased."

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A bit of a whatever chapter - reviews make me happy and write faster!


	3. I Give Up

What can I say? I type fast and upload fast, I guess. Thank you so so so soooo much for the lovely reviews, you truly have no idea how much they are greatly appreciated. On with the story!

Should've probably mentioned this at the beginning - language and suggestiveness is inevitable.

_Disclaimer: Nothing is mine. Wahh._

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**Chapter 3 - I Give Up**

I find myself caring less and less about what is on James' mind simply because at the moment, he can't give me the time of day – what with studying, homework, tutoring, Quidditch practices and his Marauder friends. I guess _girlfriend_ fits in there somewhere between _tutoring_ and _homework_, way below his _friends_ and _Quidditch_, obviously.

Binns is droning on about goblins and their constant struggle for stability in this world, but I can't help but shoot my own question at him: what about muggleborns?

Being muggleborn falls into the lovely category of _sorry, try again_. I think within four hours of my first day here at Hogwarts, everybody knew I was the new resident muggleborn trying (unintentionally) to prove herself, even though I had no clue what being 'muggleborn' really meant until Alice filled me in.

"Do you think he would even notice if I flung a spitball through his abdomen?" Sirius whispers from the table behind me, where he was placed in this month's seating plan. We're seventeen and yet Binns deems it appropriate to still have bloody _seating plans_. The thought of being a filthy mudblood momentarily flutters out of my mind as I roll my eyes.

"Yes," I answer under my breath, observing the ghost floating miserably up at the front of the classroom. My eyes twitch across to the far side of the room, where James is half-slumped over his desk, sluggishly scribbling something in the corner of his paper.

I lean back in my seat a little, the front feet of the chair leaving the cold stone floor, and rest my elbow leisurely on Sirius' desk so that I can remain balanced. "What do you think he's doing?"

The _he_ I'm referring to doesn't confuse Sirius; he looks, sits up a little bit straighter and strains his neck, eyeing his friend. Realization crosses his face for a moment before he relaxes back into a reclined position in his chair. "Drawing," says Sirius simply.

"Drawing?" I echo, arching an eyebrow. "Since when did James draw?"

"It's not like he's creating a masterpiece or anything," he laughs softly. "He used to draw a little snitch in the corner of whatever was in front of him – homework, spare parchment, the Daily Prophet – and scribble your initials into it."

"Really, my init – "

"Ms. Evans?"

Binns' winded voice carries across the room and causes me to freeze on the spot. Flinching and ignoring the smirk on Sirius' lips, I gently prop myself down on my chair and smile to the professor. "Yes?"

"While conversing with Mr. Black behind you, did you happen to hear a single word I've said?"

It's not like I haven't heard some form of it forty billion times from you before. "I'm afraid I didn't, sir," I reply honestly, as Alice peeks over her shoulder at the front of the class.

"Perhaps sheer luck will save you. Where do muggles think goblins originated from?"

Crap. Sirius starts listing off different foreign places behind me – "America, Mongolia, China, _Sri Lanka_" – in a vain but appreciated attempt to help out… except nothing comes to mind particularly.

I open my mouth to boldly state the country that I think is most likely to be the answer – France – but before I can even breath in, somebody else says it.

"France."

I whip my head around to stare across the classroom at James, who is still slouched somewhat but no longer using his desk as a pillow. He's staring ahead at Binns, instead of at me, his girlfriend, whom he just completely (almost) interrupted.

"What am I going to _do_ with him…" I hear Sirius mutter behind me, but I ignore him, watching Binns give something like a smile but a grimmer version.

"Anything else, Mr. Potter?"

James shrugs. "In Muggle folklore, they originated from France and then sort of spanned out across Europe. But it's never actually been recorded in the Ministry where they came from."

"Excellent answer," booms Binns in his wheezy tone, nodding approvingly at James. "Ten points to Gryffindor!"

I continue to stare blankly across the room until the bells goes, signaling the end of the day. The way the rest of the class gets up from their desks, you'd think it was Friday instead of Wednesday. Through the mad rush to the door, I get up and am joined by Sirius.

"Were you going to say France?" he asks me, twiddling his thumbs in an _I'm-trying-to-be-comforting-but-it's-really-not-my-forte_ sort of way.

"What's his deal?" I ask a question over his, motioning to James who is laughing at something Remus just said to him as they head towards the door at the back of the room, jammed with 7th years.

"He's my best mate."

I round on Sirius, adjusting my book bag and blazing holes in his face with my eyes. At least, that's what I imagine doing. With just _my eyes_ – how grotesque would that be?

"He's my boyfriend! And you're his confidant, his 'best mate', the person he goes to over me. Over me, Lily Evans, the one girl he's only ever chased after," I argue ferociously, tired of this, all of this, not seeing James and not being able to talk to him like normal, laugh with him like normal, just be with him like normal.

Sirius sighs and places a hand on my shoulder, giving it a fairly comforting squeeze. "Give the bloke time, okay? He's not exactly the brightest guy on the block, and I mean, who is? I'm certainly not."

I watch him walk away towards the door where James, Remus and Peter are waiting for him. Like three Musketeers, they simultaneously grin as Sirius throws his arm around pudgy Peter and scruffs up his hair a bit, causing the boy to swat fruitlessly at the hands near his head.

My eyes stay on James though, the entire time until the four have disappeared through the doorway. It almost hurts me physically to know my own boyfriend can't confess his concerns or worries or thoughts or whatever the hell he is thinking, to me.

I feel an arm slip through mine and realize Alice had probably been lingering at her own desk, purposely taking her time so that she could join me once I was alone. Pathetically, I let my head drop onto her shoulder and feel her press a consoling kiss to my temple in a sisterly type of way. What would I do without her?

"Why don't we go sneak over to the kitchens or something?" she offers, stroking my hair as we walk together to the door. "We can find Joelle and maybe Clarissa and just eat until we're bloated. You always like doing that."

I genuinely manage a smile, because that reminds me about the one time in fourth year; we were so bloated, it was like we rolled ourselves back to the Gryffindor tower. But I'm not up for chocolate or cupcakes or pie.

"Actually, I think I'll take a rain check on that," I begin, lifting my head up and giving Alice that same genuine smile. I am such a fantastic liar. "I've got some Head things to do before dinner, but how about later tonight? Sneak out like we did last month, when I jacked James'…" I trail off immediately; mentioning James brings a lump of fear to my throat, closing it up.

Alice stares through me easily, because she's known me for _that long_. She knows I don't have any 'Head things' to do, I just want to be alone. Thankfully, she doesn't press me on it and simply nods.

"Okay, see you at dinner then."

--

I dump my book bag on the floor near the coffee table, letting it lean against one of the legs with a _bang_, the sound my many textbooks and journals make against the wood.

The couch facing the fireplace looks too inviting to deny; I sprawl across it, kicking off my shoes and pulling out my messy ponytail, letting the curtain of red obstruct my view when I press my cheek against cushion. Burning merrily, the fire provides me with a sense of warmth that seeps through the sleeves of my pressed oxford shirt but suddenly my shirt seems to be suffocating, a reminder, _sorry, try again_.

Sitting up, I loosen my tie drastically and undo a few buttons, like wrenching the hand of an intruder away from my throat. I lay back down, my cheek mashed once more against the lushness of the couch.

This is stupid. I should just confront James and tell him straight up – who the hell do you think you are, keeping things from me, placing me on a list of things to deal with. I'm not tutoring, I'm not homework and I'm certainly not Quidditch practice. I'm your girlfriend and have been for eight months, though the way you're going, mister, we won't reach nine.

I lay there for quite some time, one arm dangling off the couch so that my fingertips just brush against the carpet that covers the stained wood floor. It dawns on me briefly that perhaps its dinner or perhaps I've missed it, but only when I hear the wall slide open do I move slightly, an affirmative that the body on this couch is indeed alive.

I hear a chuckle, a familiar chuckle. "Alice mentioned you had some 'Head duties' but I didn't know that meant laziness."

"You wouldn't know laziness if it walked up to you and smacked you upside the head."

"Oh, c'mon. Potter laziness has been in full swing for the past six years," James tells me, coming closer, walking around my abandoned book bag.

"Not so much nowadays, huh?" I speak quietly, raising the limp hand that was dangling near the carpet up to sweep some hair away from my face.

James is silent for a moment, before quite abruptly he hops up onto the couch. Onto me, actually. Sits down right smack dab in the middle of my back, causing me to grunt and be pressed further into the couch.

"What in God's name do you think you're doing?!" I ask shrilly, lifting my arm and then propping myself up on my elbows to look over my shoulder at James. I can feel his muscular thighs against my lower back and a sort of fleeting, warm sensation washes over me, brings heat to my face. I immediately decide that looking at him wouldn't be the best choice, so I flop my torso back down.

"Wondering what you're _doing_."

"Coincidentally…" I begin under my breath, not intending to finish the sentence or anything, but unfortunately he hears me.

Clearly his throat awkwardly, James asks, "What's that supposed to mean?" in a way that's shows he's clearly affronted and confused.

I debate for second milliseconds whether I should do as I was thinking, just ask him straight up. But this is the first time in a while where it's just been the two of us, and however bad the desire is to know what is wrong, I don't want to mess this moment up right now. I _need_ this.

"I was just wondering what you were up to, while I laid here seemingly dead but really exhausted from school," I say calmly, before adding, "Please remove your backside before you break my spine."

He laughs and slips off my body, allowing me to sit up properly. I glance up at him to see he hasn't sat down. "Well, do I need to drag you down here or what?"

"I actually came to get you for dinner, Lily," James says, smirking and bashfully messing up his hair. He makes it so impossible to stay upset at him when he does these little things that I have decided might kill me someday.

"Ah." I grab my shoes and shove them on, then place my hands next to me to lift myself off the couch, but he thrusts out a hand into my face. Appreciatively and giddily at the same time, I take it and link our fingers.

It's really wonderful to feel his warm palm against mine, to almost be able to feel his pulse, beating in sync with mine. We climb out the hole and walk down the hallway, James occasionally running his thumb along my index finger, making me smile. Perhaps I do just need to give him some space, some time.

"If you could bring one person back from the dead to ask them a question, who would you pick?" James asks me suddenly and I laugh a little at the ridiculousness that is my boyfriend.

"What a morbid question," I muse, before thinking for a moment. "My grandpa. Because I never got to meet him. I don't know whether I'd ask a question or anything, maybe 'how're you doing' type thing… you?"

"I would bring Binns back from the dead and then kill him again."

I laugh in uproar because that is so predictably something James would say, but it unfortunately brings me back to today's class where he answered the question for me, like I was some sort of four year old. I try not to feel or look resentful.

"Alright, my turn." I rack my brain for a suitable question, pursing my lips just a bit. "If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?"

"I _can_ go anywhere in the world," he points out but silences after I give him a tired look. "Okay, okay… I'm going to have to go with Greece. You?"

I contemplate for a few moments, debating between a few places. "The Caribbean," I say finally and James laughs slightly, arching an eyebrow.

"Caribbean, huh?"

"Yes, the Caribbean. I think it would be amazing, with the beaches and I could go snorkeling and exploring islands. Why did you pick Greece?"

James shrugs slightly. "My parents went there for their honeymoon and I've seen a lot of pictures. One day, maybe I'll go there… for mine." His voice sort of trailed off, diffidently.

"Your honeymoon? What a lucky girl," I comment playfully, but suddenly his hand is sort of stiff in mine and he's looking away from me, at the walls, at anything other than _me_.

Uncertainty strikes me like a bolt of lightning. Oh, no. I stepped over the line? I couldn't have, it was just a simple statement. I meant nothing by it! It's not like… it's not like I expect us to get married or anything.

But truthfully – ironically enough – I'm lying to myself. Of course I've pictured our future, marriage, kids, and growing old. It surprises me that these thoughts come to me so easily, but perhaps they won't now, because it seems James doesn't think the same way.

It's a strained silence across the entrance hall through the doors and I'm relieved when Sirius calls out, "OY! POTTERS! OVER HERE!"

The fact that he referred to us as 'Potters' seemed to fuel James' fire even more. His hand slips from mine and I'm overcome by an impression of frostiness, even though the hall is pleasantly warm, like the June weather outside.

Alice, Jo and Frank are sitting a few students away from the Marauders. I follow James down between the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw tables, and normally if he was going to sit down with his friends and I with mine, he'd kiss me lightly on the lips, or cheek or even forehead, but he slides onto the bench and gratefully accepts a plate from Peter without even looking back.

I stand there like an idiot, staring at the back of his head for a moment. A slight laugh of almost disbelief leaves my lips, but it's quiet enough that Mr. Oblivious doesn't hear it.

Sirius does. He looks up over the top of James' head at me, sympathetic. "_Don't_," he mouths to me, not one of the other boys around him noticing the one word he accentuated.

I swing on my heel and furiously, I storm down the aisle and come to the others just in time to see Alice dive across the table to snatch up the edition of the Daily Prophet Jo was examining. I catch a glimpse of the front page while sitting down on the bench.

"What's that?" I ask rudely, pointing at the newspaper Alice was now attempting to shove into her bag.

"Nothing."

"Clearly it's not _nothing_," I say. "Don't insult my intelligence, give me the damn paper."

"Didn't y-you see it this morning?" Alice squeaks, retracting her hands with the paper crumpled in them.

I shake my head in silence and hold my hand expectantly out at her.

Jo looks at Alice and whispers beseechingly, "She'll find out eventually."

"Find out what?" I'm started to get seriously irritated now. First it was my boyfriend who wasn't telling me anything, then his best bloke, now my own _friends_ were keeping something from me.

I was unaware this was Make Lily Evans Mad Week.

Alice cautiously places the creased paper in my awaiting hand and I unfold it with flourish, looking down at the front page. The air is sucked immediately out of my lungs and my hands tighten around the edges of the paper, the knuckles going white along with the familiar crinkling sound of parchment. It stares me in the face, the huge heading, large, daunting black letters: _'You Know Who says Muggleborns will be extinguished, one by one'_

Underneath the massive caption, a smaller print reads: _'Ministry to take immediate actions, fears massive muggleborn-killings in near future, 200 muggleborns perished in the last year alone'_

I can hear Alice furiously telling Joelle and Frank that it was a bad idea to let me read it. I ignore them pointblank and continue to read the article, my very _being _rising in fury and resentment. My vision blurs and I blink feverishly, but I can't finish it. I can't bring myself to read these words. I slam the paper on the table, knocking over Jo's goblet which she is quick to clean up with her wand.

"That… that _monster_… I swear to God… how _dare_ he … I - I …"

Barely being able to form a coherant sentence and well aware that the sound of the Daily Prophet smacking the table has alerted nearby students, who are now staring at me as if I'm about to erupt, I stand up shakily, knocking the bench slightly.

I don't know what to do with myself.

It's too overwhelming. Anger thrumming, pounding, aching in my veins, I blindly walk myself down the walkway, like somebody walking the plank on a pirate ship, trying to be as normal as ever but by now, most of the Gryffindor table is staring at me. Like I give a flying _fuck_.

_Sorry, try again. Sorry, try again. Sorry, try again_.

A hand comes out of no where and grabs my wrist. I look down and find James getting up, concerned for his little Lily.

"Lils – "

I set my jaw and stare straight at him, unresponsive to his touch, as unresponsive as he has been and continues to be towards me.

"Fuck off, just fuck off," I growl boldly and wrench my tiny wrist from his grip, turning around without wavering and striding off, out of the Great Hall, destination nowhere but wanting to go _everywhere_.

My vision is irritatingly blurry again and I can hardly see which direction I'm going – I think towards the Head tower, I _hope_ towards the Head tower – but I can hear my name being called, yelled, shouted, and footsteps like somebody is running after me.

Nobody _runs_ after me. Not my sister after she's declared me a freak, not Severus when he calls me a mudblood to uphold his reputation, nobody. I'm not the person people run after.

_Sorry, try again_.

"What the hell was that, back there?" James shouts down the hallway, catching up with me. I could run, I could try and out run him but I know it's no use.

"I told you to fuck off. Clearly you don't listen."

He grabs my arm, whirling me around; aghast like what _I'm_ doing isn't normal, like _I'm_ the bad person here. "C'mon, talk to me – "

I laugh loudly, mockingly, in his face. "Talk to you," I repeat in disbelief, shaking my head. "How about you bloody talk to me, James. Not your best mate. Why don't you pay attention to me, instead of stupid Quidditch. I'll talk to you when you realize that I'm your girlfriend, not just another 'thing' on your plate."

"Thing on my plate? Lily, honey, what the hell…"

"Let go of me, James," I manage, blinking repeatedly. "Just let go of me."

He looks desperate, worn down, tired. "I can't… you know that," he whispers, misinterpreting entirely.

I stare up at him, no longer blinking, letting the little wet things fall from my eyes in streams.

"You already did," I murmur back, and when his grip falters in surprise, I pull away and turn around for a second time, walking away from him, even though it kills me, it hurts me inside, deep inside.

* * *

Dun dun dun. Fear not! Lily's Patronus dilemma will make an appearance and so will Snape but that's all I'm tellin' ya.


	4. Graves & Notes

Yay update. Thank you so much to all the reviewers: clumsyjuliet27, lori-loo, pippapear, Celtic-Elements, AdelphaHighbrow (don't you dare try to predict more of my story! HA!), Blue-Eyed Chica, WithoutxYou, TaylorxxSue, xshrimpyx, RachelElizabeth and anybody I may have forgotten, heh. Mucho appreciation.

Also, if you happen to spot any grammatical or spelling errors, feel free to mention it. I've caught a few in the previous chapters so far, whoops.

_Disclaimer: None of this is mine. Crap._

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**Chapter 4 – Graves & Notes**

When James asked me out in November, I gave him heart failure, a stroke, a hernia, those sorts of things, when I said "yes" promptly in return. But the day after my minor, teeny weeny little explosion at dinner, I gaze down the table at him and can't help but scathingly think _you did this, stop coming across so_ _miserable_.

"You look like shit," Jo says suddenly from across the table, taking a large bite out of her sandwich and examining me with extreme curiosity, like I'm some sort of wounded animal at a zoo, willing and open for the public to observe.

"Thank you." I reach for the tray in the middle of the table, grabbing a sandwich for myself.

It's a mystery how I managed to function through the morning, although I did only have one class with James – Potions, and he's on the other side of room – but in no way did I do it cheerfully, the functioning. The Marauder's scathing gazes burnt holes in my forehead in every class, because infuriatingly enough and because whatever higher power there is up above the clouds wants to make my life even _better_, there had to be at least one of the other three in each of my classes.

No, no, I won't ever get rid of them. Tiny, infectious _maggots_.

"I think you should just whip out of your wand right now and conjure that adorable doe and stick it to the man!" Jo says enthusiastically, as Frank gives a sort of mumbled 'hear, hear!' with cheese in his mouth.

I take a napkin and clear away the mashed cheese he propelled onto the table. "It's not like I broke up with him, officially…"

"You might as well have!" argues Alice fiercely, making the rest of us start a little in surprise. "I'm sure what you did to the poor guy was the equivalent of ripping out his heart with your bare hands and then sticking it in that muggle contraption, what is it, a _wood chipper_?"

Jo hints to Frank that perhaps he should try his very hardest not to break up with Alice, _ever_.

I want to throw this around and come back with something horrible about Alice, but simply put, she's really awesome (except right now). "Look, imagine Frank ignores you and doesn't pay much attention to you and clearly you know something is wrong, it's really hard for the rest of the world to _not_ notice, but yet he still remains evasive and inattentive. How would _you_ feel?"

"Like I'd want to blow his brains out, but I wouldn't break up with him!"

Frank goes a lovely pasty white shade.

"I didn't exactly," I stress to her in a hiss, disinclined to open hostilities this early. "I didn't say 'James, we're done, and we are no longer going out'. I'm just really mad at him, that's all."

Alice seems to be on the verge of an epileptic fit. "Fine, wish away your love life for all I care, but I guarantee you that there will never be another man in your life that adores you more than James has and will."

The words strike home and sink deep: I know this, I know this very well. Over Christmas holidays, James dropped by and immediately, without a single doubt, I knew that my dad would like him, even though my dad has never grown to accept any guy that Petunia and I have brought home. But with James, it was different.

My dad said at the end of the night, after James had gone home, that he knew, he simply knew, that James would always be there for me. And above all else, that satisfied him.

"Is he looking this way?" I ask Jo, who immediately leans in a little to look.

"No, he's talking to Black."

"Probably something about not letting you go that easily," Frank pipes up, like that's supposed to make me feel better. He's been 'letting me go' for a few weeks now, Loggybottom.

I stress a smile, faking that was comforting, and then glance over the heads of some miniature first years at the Marauders. Peter is spooning soup into his mouth as Sirius and Lupin seem to be intensely talking to James about something. Maybe… maybe Frank _is_ right.

The flutter of hope that stretches from the depths of my feet to the top of my red curls is washed swiftly away when Lupin spots me out of the corner of his eye, staring down like a _moron_ at them. I flush red and turn away, but Jo continues to marvel at them.

"Yup," she confirms suddenly, "Lupin just definitely told Potter you were staring at him resembling like a fish." She always did have an outstanding knack for reading lips.

"We have Arithmacy in three minutes, Lily," Alice voices suddenly, and I momentarily fear another blow to my ego and confidence but her expression is neutral, calm, and anything but fierce.

I absentmindedly tuck some hair behind my ear. "That's all fine and dandy, but I refuse to get up until they do."

Frank snorts slightly, gathering his own things from the bench beside him. "James and Sirius have a spare, remember? And they enjoy food more than the average human, so they'll probably be sticking around to – "

"Alright, Bottom Boy – point taken," I grumble, grabbing my book bag and getting up, slinging it over my shoulder. Before Alice has a chance to even swing herself out from the bench, I leap across the aisle so that I'll end up walking furthest away from the Gryffindor table.

I'm hoping James remains apathetic and blind like he's been recently, so that he doesn't spot me slinking by.

"I don't mean to be a bitch, Lily," Alice whispers as we make our way towards the huge doors, my gaze firmly upon the cracked tiles my feet are walking upon. "It's just… you and James, this whole thing, it's probably a simple misunderstanding and I would really hate it if this was truly, permanently ruined."

"Say 'love' a little louder, please," I sarcastically beg as we approach the Marauders seated at the end of the Gryffindor table. "I don't think my idiot boyfriend or ex-boyfriend or whatever the fuck he is _heard you_."

We walk calmly by them, but when I say calmly I mean I averted my gaze and nearly stumbled over my own feet – which might have been the worst, WORST possible thing to have happen to me – while attempting to keep my chin up in some sort of _I'm-not-shriveling-up-without-you _gesture.

"That went well, didn't it?" Alice whispers once we're a short distance from the exit.

"Yeah," I answer distantly, pained.

Part of me now realizes that if James had turned his head as I had gone by, my spirits would've lifted, because then maybe, just maybe, he had come to his senses. Realized what he's _doing_ to me, what he _had_ been doing to me.

"Lily? Something wrong?"

Only everything.

--

Crap. Crappity crap, shit, shit, shit.

I stare at my desk from the doorway of Binns' classroom, where only a few students have gathered so far, the hallway still packed to the top with people. I incline my head slightly towards the ceiling.

Strike me down now, if you want me dead so badly.

I go up the aisle and take my seat, well aware that in a few moments, James' best mate will be seated behind me and will make it his top priority to make me feel like absolute waste, a skill that comes quite easily to him.

I consider burying my face in my arms and not coming up until the end of the day, but my planning is thwarted when the Marauders come bustling in, loud and animated, all except for one.

I hear a body drop into the seat behind me and remain quite still. Crap, crap, crap. I don't want to go through this, I really don't.

"Merlin, thank you for finally standing up for yourself."

Woah. What?

I revolve slowly in my seat to see a very relieved Sirius Black beaming ear to ear at me.

"You glared at me this morning in Potions. Upholding your Marauder status, I take it?"

Sirius nods, mighty pleased I've come to terms with his position. "Remus and Pete don't know what's up with James and I do, so I had to play along, you know? Pretend like you were the bad guy and – "

"I'm not!" I butt in quickly, adamant for people to understand this. "I'm not the bad guy."

Binns begins the class and not wanting a repeat of yesterday's mortifying incident, I dismissively shake my head at Sirius and turn back around to take notes.

As the professor goes on and on about junk that I couldn't give a rat's ass about, my minds slips off on it's own. The stolen moments we had together, me and James, where all we'd do was laugh and joke and… and be a couple. I miss that a great deal.

My fingers start to cramp after a while and I take a break, flexing them in and out. I feel something glide over my shoulder and look down to see a piece of parchment float down onto my lap, my skirt. Idly, I pick it up, noting the familiar scrawled writing, the lowercase letters (a fascination of Mr. Black's) and the complete lack of punctuation, also a sure sign that this is Sirius' handiwork.

_this isn't the full extent of it and there's a whole lot more but james was considering __**just considering**__ breaking up with you_

I stare at the paper, feeling it slide slightly in grip, loose with astonishment. The floor wants to fall out from underneath me and send me twirling, spinning, trying to claw my way out of some sort of chasm of heartbreak. Even though _I_ was the rude one yesterday, even though it seemed like _I_ wanted to end it, even though he probably assumes that it was indeed wrecked, by _me_… this rocks me so hard that I realize I haven't been breathing for the past minute.

_Sorry, try again. Sorry, try again. Sorry, try again. Sorry, try again_.

He was going to end it? I stare at the two words, 'just considering' penciled in harder than the rest of the words, trying to prove a point. It's so nice that he was just considering, not decided. Just thinking about it, not sure yet. My jaw clenches and so do my hands, scrunching up the paper, my fingernails biting into the parchment.

I grab my quill and calmly attempt to flatten out the paper enough for me to write a response. When Binns is turned to the other side of the room, _James' side_, I slide the tiny piece of parchment onto the table behind me.

_Then I'm so glad that I ended it __**first**__._

I imagine him staring down at the parchment, his table partner oblivious, staring down at the one word that I darkened, _trying to prove a point_.

I'm expecting a response, because I'm expecting Sirius to think like I _had_ been thinking: that I technically hadn't broken up with James, it was merely some harsh words, an intense exchange, a fight.

The paper dribbles onto my lap again. Oh, look, he's added some punctuation.

_so you did then? you did break up with james?_

I stash the parchment in my bag and don't write back; at the end of the class, I'm fairly convinced Sirius has his answer.

--

Reading over Sirius' note, Alice's round face flushes, her eyes widen and then narrow, her mouth becomes a straight, tight line. She begins to gape in silence, seemingly unable to form words, then, passing it to Jo for her to read, she looks down at me.

"I don't want sympathy," I say, except it would sound a lot better if I hadn't turned my face into my pillow the moment she had passed it on to Joelle, unable to watch another reaction to the words written on it.

"Lily, _honey_…" Alice implores, sitting down on the very edge of my bed and rubbing my exposed back, up and down, circles, and it's oddly comforting. I feel another weight climb onto the bed, Jo, feel her sweep my hair away, running her fingers through it.

It is possible to have the rest of the world continuing on without you, because you're stuck in some sort of time warp – pause, rewind, play, pause, rewind, play, pause, rewind, play – repeating the moment where my eyes graced that very parchment, discarded now on my bedroom floor along with other things I discard: wrappers, lone socks, old corrected homework.

"What do you want us to do? Go beat him up?" Jo asks hopefully from above me, braiding my hair into a plait.

"When one of you, I don't care who, writes my eulogy, I want you skip over this moment in time. The whole 'James' part of my life. Just skip right over it." I meant it as a joke, a lighthearted attempt to break the overwhelming sense of misfortune and unwanted sympathy, but the girls are silent above me.

A hand comes up, brushing across the top of my head. "You want to be alone?"

"Right now, yes," I answer truthfully, turning myself over. "If you run into him downstairs or something, don't say anything, please."

I know Alice will listen to me, but Joelle has forever been my violent, 'if he hurts you I'll hurt him' friend and I see her eyes flash for a moment, questioning whether she should listen to me or sod it all and deck him anyways.

"Bugger," she finally says, facetiously. "At graduation I'm going to hex him, alright?"

I find myself truly grinning at her as they climb off by bed and give me words of encouragement, even though I know nothing, not even somebody telling me I just inherited a million dollars from some ancient ancestor, would comfort me.

I glance at my alarm clock and then close my eyes. I don't want to go to dinner. I don't want to be in the same room right now with him, I don't think I _can_ be in the same room as him right now.

_Sorry, try again_, my mind taunts.

--

When I wake up, groggy and still as unhappy, the first thing I notice is that it's dark out. My limbs feel heavy, like iron, as I swing myself up into a seated position on my bed, legs dangling over the edge. It's nearly ten thirty and I'm suddenly restless, needing to do something, anything.

I weigh my options: there's always going to the Gryffindor common room to find Joelle or Alice, but I run the risk of walking into the Marauders or even worse, James; then again, there's a chance when I simply walk down the staircase into the Head common room I'll find him; or perhaps I can be really rebellious and walk around the lake.

Yes, that seems fitting.

Without even considering the weather, I leave my room and hold my breath, walking down into the dimly lit room that James and I have spend many a nights studying or talking or cuddling. Stab me _harder_ in the heart, why don't you.

I don't run into anybody on my journey through the halls, just a Prefect, Liam, with his girlfriend – "Won't report us, will you?" – giggling and laughing, supporting her as they walk.

I wish I didn't run into anybody else, but like everything in my life right now, wishing fails me. Out of the corner of my eye when I turn a corner, I catch a glimpse of a black cloak, black greasy hair, and a pale face. You've got to be shitting me.

Head Girl comes rearing from underneath the thick layer of recklessness. He's suddenly walking away from me, striding actually, cloak billowing out around him, taking up half the damn corridor.

"Snape," I call loudly, "Syltherin common room is in the other direction."

He halts and turns. Severus knows he's caught and I see the brief thought cross his pale features whether he should just continue wherever he was going. But I take a few steps closer and he chooses wisely.

"Where's your boyfriend?" he sneers as he begins to walk towards me, because the fastest way to his house is behind me.

"What boyfriend," I find myself scoffing in return, and I don't miss the slight shock that crosses Snape's face for a moment.

He seemed quite intent on walking right by me without another word, but now that he's learned this juicy bit of information, Severus slows down, approaching me.

"He was never good enough for you, I'm glad you came to your senses."

I fold my arms over my chest, tilting my head, surveying Severus with an air of interest. "Never good enough? What, and you are?"

He reddens and I have the strange desire to laugh at how different his face is now. "I never said that, but you can do way better than James Bloody Potter, King of the World." His tone makes me wince; he truly hates my boyfriend… ex-boyfriend, whichever.

I stare at him for a moment, swelling slightly at this bit of information. Even if I was inclined to believe it, my doe quandary would still haunt me. How can James not be the one for me, but my Patronus fits so nicely with him?

"My Patronus is a doe," I reveal quietly, wondering whether I need to elaborate further for him to understand the complexity and weight of this, but from the expression he's taken on, I think he grasps it just fine.

"A… a doe."

He seems to struggle with what to say next, before settling on, "I guess that's pretty self-explanatory."

"I guess."

We stare at each other for a second more; both of us probably realizing these few sentences are the most we've spoken in a fair number of years.

"Do you miss it? Do you miss us?" I ask him, so softly that I wonder whether he even heard me.

It's like his face melts away, leaving the imprint of the young boy I knew from the park, who told me about wands and cloaks and spells and showed me who I truly was.

"Every single day." Snape reaches into his pocket and drags his wand into view, looking back up at me and opening his mouth, appearing on the verge of saying something fairly big.

But before he can get around to it, his eyes widen when he spots something over my shoulder. I don't need to see the level of distain on Severus' face to know who it is.

"Pocket that wand and get _the hell_ away from my girlfriend."

James approaches us, Head Boy badge in full view like he's wearing it as a crown. His own wand is out but at his side, and I imagine it twitching to be used. I look at Snape to see him sneering.

"Girlfriend? Just a minute ago Lily implied you and her were _done_," he mocks, reluctantly putting his wand back in his clock pocket but not retracting his hand.

James marches past me, coming nose to nose with Snape, glaring down at him. "Perhaps Lily won't come to your aid this time, Snape. Remember when she did that and you paid her back by calling her that – that word?"

I stare at James' back, so broad that I can't even make out Snape in front of him. Halfheartedly, I come to James' side, looking between them. "Don't," I say evenly and immediately, like I've branded him, Severus' hand comes out of his pocket.

He brushes past James, stalking off down the hallway towards the Syltherin house, leaving me and James standing in the hallway. He turns slightly towards me, face, eyes softening.

Pause, rewind, play. I simply shake my head at him, no longer wanting to walk around the lake. My bed seems very appealing.

But before I can turn around, he places his warm palm on my cheek, keeping me there, staring down at me. His eyes bore into mine and I weaken, just slightly, against my better judgment.

"I… I wasn't going to break up with you," James whispers to me, voice tense. Sirius must've come clean, told him that he had told _me_ about his little plan, his considerations.

"You were thinking about it. And I had no idea. Do you know much that hurts, James?"

His face falls, his fingers stroking some hair by my ear. "I… I just can't deal with everything right now, you don't understand, it's not anything bad, but I've realized something and I've just been thinking – "

" – thinking about breaking up with me."

I push away his hand from my face, leaving my cheek feeling considerably colder. "You dig your own graves, James, you lie in them."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" He's on the defense now, like we're on some sort of Quidditch pitch, opposite ends, opponents in this stupid game people call love.

"You know exactly what it means," I reply, sighing. "If you weren't so caught up in your own little world, you'd realize you were slowly pushing me away, day by day, practice by practice, tutoring session by tutoring session… you started this. This is _your_ fault."

I poke him irritably in the chest, turning on my heel and my objective to walk myself right to my bed. But he's resilient; I have to give him that.

"You said yesterday about a plate, and yeah, I do have a lot on my plate but right now I need you just understand and – "

"You needed me to understand. You don't need me anymore," I say, walking quicker away from him. "You have your _best mate_ to moan and groan and go to."

"Is that what this is about? You're _jealous_?"

My eyes widen to the size of saucer plates and I whirl, skirt fluttering around my thighs and my hair twisting mid-air. James almost takes a step back.

"Jealous," I repeat. "You think I'm jealous? You are so far from it, you're on the other side of the fucking planet."

I want to hit him, I really do. "I'm not going to stick around for your plate to clear up, with the help of your best friend. You got something on your mind, you want to say something to me, then fucking say it James, just fucking _say_ it."

He stands there, staring at me. I'm breathing heavier, furiously, everything aching. My heart _hurting_. James doesn't say a thing to me.

"Coward," I whisper, shaking my head. "You man up and I'll be there, listening to every damn word that comes from your mouth, but until then, you stay away from me."

It's clear he isn't going to fight this anymore and when I start walking away again, I don't hear his footsteps following. My doe is a thing in the past right now, because as of this moment, I am not in love with James. I'll kid myself into eventually thinking that. I'll conceal the feelings, cover them in dirt; maybe bury them in my own graves.

When I walk away, I don't hear him whisper to himself, two very distinct words.

* * *

You can probably imagine what Severus was going to show Lily there. I feel so evil, diabolical.


	5. Really? Happiness?

Thaaaannk you for the reviews, once again, for the billionth time. So seriously appreciated and adored. Makes me all fuzzy and warm inside, you know. This chapter isn't my favorite for some reason, and is a tad shorter than the rest, but whatever. It'll do? Also, two more chapters, I suspect!

_Disclaimer: Although I wish very much to have my own little version of the Marauderhunks underneath my bed, I don't own squat._

* * *

**Chapter 5 – Really? Happiness?**

"Snape is bad news," Jo says promptly after I've finished explaining last night festivities to her in Divination, Alice leaning back in her bean bag in front of us, a level lower, so that she can hear it too.

"A few years ago you said _James_ was bad news too," I retort bitterly, waving my hand briefly in front of my face but it's no use; this room has a permanent hazy atmosphere that drives me absolutely batty.

"Let's look at the current situation, shall we?" Alice tilts her head back and looks up at us, upside down, but her facial expression is clear: Joelle was right, in the long run.

I look away – perfectly, indisputably, incontrovertibly fine being really, really mad at James. It was easy to get into arguments with him and remain angry with him until he did that little_ something-is-on-your-shirt-but-while-you-look-down-I'm-going-to-tap-your-nose-and-kiss-the-top-of-your-head_ thing. It was easy to get over whatever petty argument we had had, but this… this isn't petty.

This hurts.

"I say we rip off one of his balls so he has to go around for the rest of his life… lopsided," Jo is plotting to my immediate left.

"He'll be unbalanced!" Alice laughs in delight. I see her looking my way. "Lily… have you… y'know…"

Jo uses her inept tact to clarify. "We want to know whether you know first hand if chopping off one of his balls will even prove worthwhile. Also known as, _have you done the de_e_d_?"

Have I ever… oh, Merlin. "No, I have not," I whisper, outraged. "You would think I would have told you if I had."

"How are we supposed to know? You could be a private person..."

"You've known me for nearly seven years, Alice!"

Flapping her hands at me to hush up, Alice sighs. "Alright, perhaps we should hold off the ceremonial testicle chopping. Maybe James'll pull a quick recovery out of his arse and save this." I can tell by her tone of voice, however hard she tries to hide it and ignore it, that she wants this to work out just as much as I (subconsciously) do.

"Can you imagine the looks on his future bed partner's faces if they look down and see – "

"Jo, for heaven's sake, we get it. It would be bloody hilarious!" I have to acknowledge, the idea sounds pleasantly vindictive.

As much as I hate to admit it to myself, the thought of graduating and moving into the real world is now a really daunting thing. I… I always assumed that I would have something familiar and solid to fall back on, somebody to be there for me.

If anything, now I have to watch James walk away, probably out of my life forever. God, could this get worse? I have to face the fact that this didn't work and there really isn't that's going to make this better – maybe a rebound guy – and I just accept the fact that he and I are just going to move on.

"You look disconcerted, Ms. Evans," whispers a sudden voice, silky smooth, jolting me back to my reclined position on my puff of a chair.

The professor is looking down at me gravely, spectacles perched on her nose and her beady eyes fixed upon my face. Everybody says she's got 'supernatural' gifts, but we're wizard and witches, what do we know? Until I was eleven I thought my kind was just as supernatural.

I see her look down at my abandoned tea cup. "Go for it," I urge.

Even though I find this subject pretty dull and repetitive, maybe my blasted tea cup has something better to say than my blasted… boyfriend/ex-boyfriend. I wish I knew what we were, other than strained.

Joelle, a firm non-believer like me, eyes the bat-resembling woman as she picks up my tea cup daintily with her incredibly long fingernails. I expect her to shriek something about heartbreak, a dismal love life, confusion, frustration, but what she says stuns all three of us:

"You are going to be very happy."

After a pregnant moment of silence, Jo squints a little, raising herself on her chair to try to look down into the cup. "Are we talking about the same person here?"

"I suspect so," the professor says cheerfully, putting my cup down and looking directly at me. "Happiness is a hard thing to achieve, Ms. Evans, if you go about it the wrong way." She floats off to inspect somebody else's tea cup.

Alice snorts. "If she thinks that's something powerful, it's not. Obviously that's a given. It's not like I go around Avada Kedavraing people, assuming I'll find contentment afterwards."

Somehow I don't think that's exactly how the professor meant it.

The bell goes off before I have any more time to decipher the interesting batch of words I've been presented with – _sorry, try again_. It's the last class on a Friday afternoon and in a great tumult, the class rushes through the bleachers towards the hatch.

"How about we skip homework and studying and that junk," Joelle begins, swinging her bag over her shoulder, "and head down to the lake!"

--

Like I assumed, every other student in Hogwarts had the exact same idea as we did.

I watch some second years throw a frisbee, staring after it in bizarre interest as it flies through the air, the teeth of the frisbee biting away continually at nothing as it soars. A young girl catches it and luckily, her fingers don't come near the exposed gnawers.

"Can you imagine? This time next week, we'll be half a day away from graduating."

"Don't remind me," Jo bemoans. She's taken up the position with her legs in the air, lying vertically on the trunk of the tree we've found shade under.

"Me neither." I cast an apprehensive glance across the grounds, but the Marauders and more importantly James, are no where to be found. Relaxing on the grass, leaning back so that my face is in the sun, I put my hands behind my head and close my eyes. "Let's not lose touch or drift away, okay?"

They answer simultaneously: "Deal."

"We won't let our careers or our boyfriends or anything get in the way," Jo says firmly and I hear her shoes against the bark as she shifts.

Alice makes a noise in the back of her throat, some sort of agreement. "I… I want you guys to be my bridesmaids. Just you two."

Jo asks it before I can, "Have you and Frank…?"

"Last night," the blonde whispers, her voice so light and airy and full of adoration that it makes my heart hurt even more, rips it apart, because that's how I _should_ sound, that's how I _want_ to sound. "We just discussed the possibility."

The word 'congratulations' is caught in my throat somewhere along with 'I love you', which I had been meaning to say to James since Sunday.

"Good for you," I say finally, staring at the clouds that pass by lazily, indifferently, overhead.

We remain silent for a few moments, the only noise coming from the rest of Hogwarts which is spread out on the surrounding grounds. I know that my Head Girl duties entail watching over such activities, inspecting carefully for reckless and troubling ones, but I can't bring myself to sit up, let alone open my eyes.

"You two are going to be the godmothers to my child," Joelle says suddenly.

Alice and I both laugh a little; Joelle has never really been the type to firmly settle down and plant roots somewhere, in a house surrounded by a white picket fence with a porch and swing set in the back. Joelle… well, she's the one sending our children gifts from foreign countries that she visits, and sending letters informing us about the many foreign men she's happened to sleep with so far. She's the one our future husbands will stare at weirdly and go, "_How are you friends with her_?"

"Child?" I ask curiously.

Joelle confirms my suspicions about her future, "Well yeah, with the amount of men I'll be shacking up with, I'll probably end up having at least one kid that you'll have to help me raise because I will seriously have no bloody clue."

In amusement, Alice wonders outloud, "Don't tell me that's why you and Sirius broke up last year."

"Hell no!" I can hear Joelle throw something at Alice, maybe a textbook, maybe an ink bottle. "We broke up because he's trash."

I cringe upwards towards the sea of blue above me. "That's a tad severe, don't you think?"

"Is James trash?" Alice asks out of the blue, before Jo can argue on the point I made.

I open my eyes in surprise. Toying with the question, I finally reply, quite timidly, "No. He's great."

"What's great?"

Concurrently three things happen at once: I tilt my head back against the grass, driving my red hair into it, to see that Remus and Sirius are standing together, surveying us with interest; Alice shrieks a little at the sudden disruption and arrival of a new voice, and Joelle cusses in pain as her legs slip from the bark.

"The fact that this was once a peaceful area," I answer effortlessly, rolling over onto my belly and looking up at them again. "Can we help you?"

"_You_ can," Remus says, an all too knowing look to his face. "James is in shambles," he adds swiftly, bluntly.

"Evasive, heartless shambles!" Joelle adjusts herself onto her knees, glaring at them.

"Go away," Alice says pointedly, her gaze just as fierce as Joelle's. I admire them for standing up for my dignity, but it's unnecessary.

I absentmindedly rub a hand across my forehead. "That's lovely," I play with a blade of grass, "but I don't I really care."

"Look," Sirius is suddenly crouching down in front of me, giving me one of the harshest looks I've ever been on the receiving end of. "He's my best mate, like I've said a trillion times, but I know what the guy wants and he wants _you_."

"He wants the idea of me."

Remus swells. "Whatever delusions you've got implanted in your mind – no doubt from these two – " he indicates to Jo and Alice, "get rid of them! This is a misunderstanding, you have to trust us."

I stare up at the pleading faces of James' best mate and, well, second best mate, I guess. "Does he always send his buddies to do his bidding?"

I've crossed a line, that's clear the moment the last word has left my mouth. Remus goes red as Sirius' face steels up, jaw tightening. "You directly ignore him and swear at him and tell him to leave you alone when he attempts to do it himself."

Why are they trying to make _me _feel bad? My confidence is faltering, I won't lie. I look away from the two young men and stare around the grounds. Even though the sun is bright and shiny and radiating down on us, I feel cold. Like magnets drawn to metal, my eyes drift across to the Quidditch stadium. If I squint hard enough, I can just make out the gold and red.

"Just so you know," Sirius says as he straightens, "he flies around that goddamn pitch every night for at least _four_ hours. Hasn't stopped. Won't listen to a word we say. Just," he frustratingly runs a hand through his hair, "just talk?"

"How can I do that when he didn't for nearly two weeks?"

They both stare down at me, and I finally see that the words I've been trying to convey have hit home. My Patronus, the sparkling doe, floats in my mind's eye but I push it away. It has to be a mistake; Patronuses can change, right?

I'll just change mine.

--

"I really think it'd be good to get her out into a social situation."

"I wholeheartedly agree, but the Quidditch game?"

"What, are we going to let her sulk in her room?"

"Merlin, no. But this is the game that James has practiced and practiced and practiced for, coincidentally ignoring Lily in the process."

If Joelle and Alice think what they're doing can be considered 'whispering', they are so far gone. I lean away from the door where I had my cheek pressed up, half amused and half irritated by the two of them. I have _three_ mums.

It's only eleven o'clock and the game doesn't start till two, but they must think that I'm still in bed, still have the covers pulled tight over my head, still moping in my little world of self-misery. As Alice says something about sneaking off to Hogsmeade, I open the door.

Joelle stumbles a little, having been leaning against it until I had whipped it open, causing her to lose her balance. Alice jumps a tad, but they remain relatively unsurprised.

"We didn't _think_ we could hear your snoring," Joelle says fairly, smiling and then taking in my nightgown, raising her eyebrows. "I had no idea you were getting back at Potter by showing every inch of skin possible."

"I wasn't, I mean, I'm not." I flush slightly, holding the side of the door and looking expectantly at the two of them. "I'm going to the game, by the way," I add firmly, seeing Alice cringe slightly. "It'll be good for me; you know, get out and support Gryffindor."

"Support _James_ – "

Jo quells Alice with a simple look. "That sounds like a brilliant idea. Now shower, get dressed and we'll do our faces!"

"Like in first year when we were introduced to the world of make up?" Alice asks skeptically, wondering where the sudden urge for immaturity came from.

I leave the doorway and go towards my dresser, opening drawers to get clothes for the day. Something nice, maybe. Something that would make James want to eat his own heart out. I hear Jo scoff as they step into my room and close the door gently behind them.

"I thought maybe we could… camouflage our faces in gold and red," she says bashfully, and I turn, raising my eyebrows, at the same time Alice laughs slightly.

We sort of exchange a three-way glance. Sounds good to me.

--

"Seriously, I think this stuff is _caked on my face_."

Alice has been complaining about our extravagant, over-the-top make up since the moment Jo finished doing hers. And now we're ten feet away from the stadium, so if you somehow do the impossible math, that's a whole lot of complaining. Our faces are split in half, red and gold; Joelle and I added words of wisdom towards the Gryffindor team across our cheeks and foreheads: KICK ASS, ROARR, and GO LIONS!

"Good," Jo says suddenly, as irritated as I am. "It'll forever be on your face and you'll never get it off, Alice, and all your wedding photos will have Frank smiling weakly with his arms around a human copy of the Gryffindor flag."

I start laughing loudly as Alice face seems to glow underneath the make-up. We follow the throng of Gryffindor supporters, some as radical as ourselves, towards the stairwells that curl up towards the bleachers.

"Lily! Lily, over here!"

I turn, looking over the heads of some abnormally tiny 4th years that squirm by us towards the front of the queue. Clarissa, a Prefect and friend of ours, is waving frantically at from the bottom entrance to the field, nearly detaching both arms in the process of getting my attention.

"I'll see you guys up there, okay? Save me a seat," I mutter to Alice, who nods and follows after Jo as I turn and fight my way against the stream of students. I remember, half way there, that we were supposed to discuss the graduation ceremony. She can't seriously want to talk about that now…

"Hi," Clarissa says breathlessly once I've found my way over to her. "I know you want to head up to the stands, but I was just wondering whether you wanted to formally schedule a time to talk about the ceremony. It's sort of been a week and we haven't really seen much of each other." She pulls me further into the entrance, masking the sounds of the feet and cheering so we can talk in private.

I sigh. "Yeah, sure. How about Tuesday night?" It's the first night I happen to think of that I'm not on duty for patrolling.

"Yeah, sure!" Clarissa repeats, bobbing her head up and down. She bids me a customary 'good luck' and skips off, shiny blonde tresses bobbing in her ponytail like her head been doing moments before. I wonder whether James likes blondes – I know Sirius does, which James always says is suspicious because Sirius always goes beet red if he reveals this and a certain shaggy blonde-haired Remus Lupin is in the same room.

I'm about to walk off, a little less enthusiastic than Clarissa had, when a familiar voice snaps through the air:

"James, bloody _listen_ to me, will you?"

I could run off, I really could. I could forget I ever heard Sirius snap at James unlike I've ever heard, I could ignore it and go find Joelle and Alice, and find myself some popcorn and just _forget about it entirely_, but I freeze on the spot when I hear James reply, very quietly, "I seem to fail miserably at listening."

"Stop being a fucking pussy, alright?" Black's tone is tired, restless, annoyed. "I've tried, I really have. But she won't have any of it. She's bloody Lily Evans; of course she's not up to listening to somebody who is trying to tell her differently than what she thinks."

My feet move on their accord, backing myself up against the wall, remaining hidden from around the corner. I strain to hear, I _want_ to hear.

"There's a big fucking world out there. It's messy and it's chaotic, and it's never, never ever the thing you'd expect. It's okay to be scared, but you cannot allow your fears to turn you into an asshole, not when it comes to the people that love you, the people that need you."

There's a stunned silence and slightly overcome, I press my fingers to my mouth. What's… what's he saying? James is scared? About what? The questions rebound all over my brain as I wait, bated breath, for some sort of response from James. He's breathing heavily, I can hear it.

Please, _please_, say something. Contradict Sirius and tell him off for being a little shit who thinks too much for his own good. Who thinks too much into things. Tell him you're fine, because never in your life have you been anything but fine. You're… oh, God, James. Please, say something.

"What the _hell_ makes you think she loves me?"

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Yeah, I'm a bad ass. Fancy a review?


	6. I Want

I posted the last chapter late in the evening and purely by mistake, I forgot to add this: the little inspirational speech Sirius says, with the swearing? Yeah, not mine. It's from **In The Land of Women**, with Adam Brody and Meg Ryan. One of my faves and the speech just seemed to fit perfectly with the story. Maybe that's why it seems so familiar.

Thank you for the reviews!

_Disclaimer: Of all my worldly possessions... nothing from here is included._

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**Chapter 6 - I Want**

Perhaps it's a tradition on one side of my family, but with Evans of the female gender, we meet men who will eventually ending up meaning something to us, but we seem to always start off hating their very existence.

When my parents were in university, my mum thought my dad was a stupid know-it-all with extremely bushy eyebrows and a permanent air of dominance. It wasn't like he was James – friendly, popular, social – in fact, it was quite the opposite. He kept to himself, but in a way that projected that he thought himself better than every other person on the world. My mum was a free-spirited hippie with no morals and no expectations, so naturally they immediately bashed heads.

It's a wonder they ended up married three years later, but I think they've rubbed off on each other. My dad can still be a little pretentious, and sometimes my mum is itching to join some sort of activist movement, but they'll bring each other down.

Kind of like James and myself. If I get too worked up and if he gets a little too… wild or immature, let's say, we'll bring each other back to earth and recover.

I climb the spiraling wood staircase, higher and higher, imagining it suddenly dropping off and just like those days in the park with Petunia, I would soar through the air, but instead of gracefully landing I'd hit the ground and that would be it.

Except the staircase ends on a landing, the entrance to the rows and rows of stands that I can see are jam-packed. I'm not entirely sure why I've come up, because I could have easily presented myself to James and Sirius down there. Why didn't I?

Oh, I know. Because I'm a pussy. Yeah, _a huge scaredy cat_.

Alice and Jo's painted faces stand out in the crowd of gold and red ribbons, flags, hats. Gryffindor pride is in full bloom, taking up the entire west side of the bleachers. As I 'excuse me' and 'sorry about this' my way through students, my eyes catch the glint of the sun off the silver of Syltherin's side.

Perhaps I should not have come…

"Lily!"

Crap. My sly escape plan is debunked when Jo spots me in the crowd and immediately begins to wave her hands to make sure I know where they are. Fly, birdie, fly.

People lean back, grumbling about the inconvenience, as I try to slink by between them and the railing. As expected, Alice and Joelle have spread out their sweaters on the bleachers to save me a space, but they've saved a rather large amount of the bench.

"Are we expecting more company?"

"Yes, in fact, we are." Alice cocks her head over my shoulder, gesturing to something behind me.

I peek around to see Sirius, Remus and Peter attempting to swim their way to us through the kids. Peter's head is barely visible in the sea of Gryffindor colors, while Sirius barks at the top of his lungs, "MOVE YOUR ASSES BEFORE I HEX THEM OFF YOUR BODY AND TOSS THEM OVER THE SIDE!"

Sirius is still threatening a large 3rd year boy with unkempt, profuse facial hair when Remus stumbles over to us, Peter in tow. "We almost said sod it when we had to get around Pimple Michelle Patrick."

"I don't see why people have to call Michelle that," Alice whispers in disgrace, the gentle motherly side of her shining through.

"Have you _seen_ her face?"

"Talking about Pimply Patrick, are we?" Sirius bulldozes his way past Remus and Peter so that he's standing next to me, cracking his knuckles as he readies himself for the game. It's sort of ritual, his stretching, which completely bemuses the rest of us because he's not the one flying around doing loop-de-loops in the air.

Remus ducks as Sirius' leg happens to do a remarkable half circle near his head. "What took you so long to come up anyways, Pads?"

Hoping dearly that my face isn't flaming red, I look away, down at the gleaming expanse of grass that the teams are trooping across towards the center. Instead of staring at the head of messy hair, I look at the Syltherin team. I see Sirius' brother, Regulus: when he flies overhead of us, Sirius always presses his hands together in prayer and asks whoever _not_ to let his brother win.

"Isn't that interesting, Evans?"

I look up at Sirius, who has raised his eyebrows. "What's is?"

He opens his mouth to repeat whatever I happened to purposefully miss out on, but then he stops himself, open-mouthed. _Crap_. But, instead of carrying on with what he was about to say, or asking me indefinitely if I happened to overhear them, he settles on, "Going to be a brilliant game, huh?"

"Amazing," I breathe.

Immediately when the game kicks off, I go into mandatory Watch James's Every Move Because I Really Don't Understand The Rest mode. I can't tell Bludgers from Beaters, even though I know they are terms in this wacky game. Almost as instantly, Slytherin is fouled for something – "Blagging!" Sirius roars, "Get Warrington out of there!" – and the Gryffindor crowd screams in delight when James scores, the ball passing easily through the person's hands.

I think maybe that's the Keeper, but don't quote me on it.

We're apparently up twenty nothing now. Leann Armstrong, our Seeker, zooms by us, ruffling hair and scarves, on hot pursuit over the Snitchy thing. Thank goodness I wasn't asked to be commentator, or am saying these things out loud, because the young man next to me would probably slit my throat.

As it is, Sirius is shrieking his own obscurities: "What kind of a move is that?", "JAMES, KEEP TO THE LEFT!", "MARY, _MERLIN'S TOES_, IS THIS YOUR FIRST GAME OR SOMETHING?"

Mary Something clearly hears him screeching at her because she fumbles with the big ball and lets it drop.

"Perhaps you shouldn't try to coach from the sidelines," I tell Sirius quietly, when I see James send a death stare over in our general direction.

Twenty agonizing and utterly confusing minutes later, it's a hundred to ninety, Syltherin in the lead. I'm not sure what happened so that they gained control of the boards, but the people around me are none too pleased about it.

"If they don't win this, I swear to God, James will never forget it."

Alice glares across me at Sirius. "Correction, _you_ will never let him forget it."

"Same difference."

I let myself lean against the railing in front of us, hands grasped around it, knuckles sheet white. I'm in fourteen different places at once when really all I want to do is calmly approach James and show him my goddamn Patronus.

And then it happens: the whistles blows just as Sirius swears loudly at the top of his lungs, scaring some neighboring students, and the Slytherin crowd erupts into cheers and screams.

"Unbe-_fucking_-lievable!" Sirius shouts, leaning forward a little over the railing. He continues, "PROVOKED! HE WAS PROVOKED!" shaking his fist at the referee on the far side of the field.

Alice, Joelle and I have long since tuned ourselves immune to Sirius' outbursts – they no longer bother us or affect us or even piss us off – but it's when _Remus_ screams, "JAMES WAS PROVOKED!" when all three of us frantically search the air for the disturbance everybody is complaining about.

"There!" Alice says, pointing out at the grass. I impolitely reach across both Sirius and Remus and pluck the binoculars from Peter Pettigrew's paws, yanking them to my eyes. He is forced to lean across towards me because they're around his neck and I've pulled them so tight it's impossible for him to whip them off his head.

James and Regulus Black are face to face on the grass near the far stands, and although this binocular is old and fails to flash what they're saying across the little windows, it's fairly obvious. They're swearing repeatedly and –

I drop the binoculars in surprise so that they swing like a pendulum across the two boys, smacking the other in the chest, causing Pettigrew to moan and sorely rub the spot, just as Sirius shouts, "YOU DID NOT JUST PUNCH JAMES!"

"Sirius, stop using such vulgar language … _Sirius_! What are you trying to do," Remus shouts, grabbing him by the back of the shirt, "throw yourself off the stands?!"

--

So they both got penalties for whatever the heck happened. Sirius and Remus have a bet on it; the latter believes it was because James just has a short temper at the moment, but Sirius remains confident that his brother said something awful to set James off.

The only thing I know is that he most definitely will have a black eye and a sore attitude.

"How long has this been going on?" Joelle's voice is tiny on the other side of Frank as she slants forward fully on the railing, chin in the palm of her hand.

"Four hours," Peter replies, communicating across the rest of us.

I tiredly rub my forehead, glancing at the sky. "It's going to rain," I mutter, eyeing the dark clouds approaching the lake with a sort of menacing manner, creeping up on the game, spoiling the afternoon.

"If the sky opens up and this is _still_ going on, I'm going in," Joelle declares, her eyes drooping.

Seeing that, I open my eyes wider just because I need to watch this and not drift off to sleep like Joelle is evidently doing. Even Sirius is subdued, just occasionally shouting whenever a Gryffindor player makes a poor choice or is near us.

A hundred and eighty to two hundred and forty. Why can't these games be simple, like football? You kick a ball into a goal and that means a whopping one point. You only have so much time and the team with the most whopping points wins. Clean, simple, straightforward.

"Peter, eat something for God's sake, your stomach is all I hear."

"You _refused_ to let me eat before!"

"Padfoot, leave him be."

"Why? I'm afraid that he might actually dive across and try to eat me up."

"You'd taste like _shit_, that's why."

Out of the corner of my eye, half listening to the boys and half trying to decipher what Rory is saying over the microphone, I spot Armstrong twist sharply in the air and shoot off towards the other end of the pitch.

"Guys," I start distantly, reaching both hands out blindly, hitting Sirius and Alice in the arms a few times, "I think something is happening."

Peering across, Sirius' eyes widen slightly. "It's the Snitch!" he says gleefully, pointing out into the air, "she must've spotted the snitch!"

Perhaps Sirius' voice carried through the wind or he just happened to catch on, but the Slytherin seeker shot up in the air, on hot pursuit of Leann, who is weaving in and out of players. The racket oozing off the stands is deafening, from both Slytherins and Gryffindor alike. We scream and cheer and slap the wood just below the railing, making as much supportive noise as we can.

My throat is beginning to feel raw – maybe from yelling, maybe from all the unsaid things trapped there – and just as I start to believe that this is just a wild goose chase, that maybe Armstrong really doesn't know where the Snitch is, she's just playing with the Slytherin's mind, the sky does in fact open up.

Big, fat raindrops begin to gradually fall on us and one lands on my cheek. Despite the teasing about it never coming off, I raise a hand to feel the make-up smudging as the raindrop glides down the curve of my face, like a tear.

"_Look_!"

I drop my hand quickly. Leann is diving towards the ground, which makes my stomach clench and do funny things, while the Slytherin Seeker is following as the precipitation continues to drop lazily.

"Oh, my _God_," I whisper. This isn't a wild goose chase, at least not anymore.

Out of the blue, pulling on her broom handle hard, Leann thrusts herself up into the air, rising higher and higher in the sky. I don't need Alice's sharp intake of breath beside me, or Sirius' mixture of swears and approval, or the eruption of the Gryffindor stands around me, or the sudden deflation on the opposite side of the stadium to know that she's done it.

She's got the bloody Snitch thing.

--

It's a hazardous adventure down the staircase, through the field entrance and out onto the field. My feet are trampled and everybody is being jostled around like chickens in a pen, but somehow, someway, Sirius manages to zigzag us towards the middle of the field, where we saw the Gryffindor team land and throw themselves in each other's arms in jubilation.

Like a large group of toddlers who might possibly go astray, we're holding hands tightly in a line. I see members of the Gryffindor team with their friends, jumping up and down, crying, and members of the Slytherin team being consoled. As immature and devilish as it sounds, I'd really love to place the tip of my forefinger under my nose and turn it up towards them.

I'm not sure why I grabbed Remus and Joelle's hands, because doing this will undoubtedly lead me right to James and recall what happened earlier before the game – "What the _hell_ makes you think she loves me?" – which will undoubtedly make this joyous occasion less joyous and more complex.

It's just drizzling now, more like mist than anything else. And then I see him: hair messier than usual and face shining with both happiness and perspiration, his goggles hanging around his neck and his broom discarded on the ground with the rest, talking to Armstrong who is still holding onto the snitch which fruitlessly flaps its wings, trying to escape.

"_Prongs!_"

Sirius is the first to him, as expected, and nearly runs him over in a hug. I'm barely conscious of the rest of them congratulating him, of the hugs exchanged and the smiles, the dramatic play by plays and opinions expressed during the game.

It's when I whisper, "James?" do the rest of them fall silent, Joelle's unanswered query about the little fight between James and Regulus hanging limply in the air between all of us.

Tactfully as always, Sirius bursts into action. "Well," he says, slinging an arm unexpectedly around Jo's shoulders, "I guess we better get going up to the tower… you know the party has already started and I want to get as wasted as I can before seven o'clock. Shall we?"

They aren't the only ones leaving: most of the pitch is emptying out, all predictably moving towards party-central. Normally it would be the Marauders up there first, instigating the tomfoolery and partying, but because James was captain of the team, they came down here first instead of congratulating him in the common room.

Except it doesn't really register that everybody is filing out of the stadium because I'm stuck on James, staring at him with my heart throbbing ten-fold in my chest.

"Can we _please_ go to the kitchens first and grab food?" Peter asks quietly.

"A little grouchy, are we?"

"I am not grouchy!"

"… he says _grouchily_."

Remus gives James a smile and a clap on the back before ushering the bickering twosome towards the queue leaving the grass. Alice, Joelle and Leann linger near us until Leann turns to James.

"Well, I guess I'll go get tackled upstairs, then. Ladies?" Even though she's a 6th year and they've barely said three words to each other, she looks expectantly at Alice and Joelle, who nod vigorously in agreement, like suddenly they've known her _forever_.

"See you upstairs," Alice grabs my hand briefly and gives it a squeeze before she follows Joelle and Leann, the former looking back over her shoulder every few steps.

A weighty silence presses upon us where we just stare at each other, apologizes being passed simply through our gazes. It's when I finally muster up the courage to say "Congratulations" when the wall breaks down.

"I'm sorry," James blurts out, and he almost takes a step forward but stops himself, unsure. "I'm so sorry."

"No," I say quickly and even though I'm as unsure as he about this, I step forward and take one of his clammy hands in mine. "I'm sorry, it should be me. I should've just stepped back and let things go, you know? If you want to confide in Sirius then who am I to get angry? I hate to think it's because you – you don't _trust_ me," he sharply inhales and his hand stiffens slightly in mind, "but even if it is… I should've been patient."

I almost feel myself fall apart when James gently pulls his hand out of mine, looking away from me. The tears gather near my lashes and my throat constricts for a moment. "You… you want to end it, I can tell," I tell him softly, closing my eyes, pretending it's because he's touching my shoulders like he used to, or is tickling my sides like he used to, pulling up my shirt and running his fingertips across my lower back and stomach like he used to.

"You don't want me anymore, do you?"

When silence is his only reply, I carry on, "Maybe you've been moving on for a while now and I just haven't seen it. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry if I was in any way a bad girlfriend." I can hardly contain myself at this point and the tears are stinging my eyes, blurring my vision. "You wanted to break up with me, so do it. I haven't done it officially, technically. Maybe you don't think I'm as committed as you, but I guess it doesn't matter anymore. Just do it, James. Like a band-aid: rip it off."

Still, he keeps quiet. Infuriated, I can't help it; I hit his arm, the closest thing to me, hard.

"For God's sake, James, we're grown-ups. This isn't first year anymore. What do you want from me? If you don't have the balls to break up with a girl then how do you expect – "

" – to go out there in the real world?" James whispers over me. "That's just it."

I stare blankly. "What?"

"Do you have any idea how scared _shitless_ I am?" he asks, looking down from the sky, which has discreetly held in the rain. "You don't get it, Lily. It's the total opposite: it's not that I don't want you anymore, God no, it's… it's that I think I want you more than you'll ever want me."

"What on earth are you – "

"You wanna know what I 'want from you'? I want you in my life until the day that death takes me, old and gray with a plethora of grandchildren. I want to see you in a white dress with your hair down, maybe a service outside in the sun and I want to kiss you with all our friends and family clapping in the background." He runs his hands roughly through his hair. "I want to come home every day from work and see you fretting over the broken dishwasher or making dinner or maybe _I'll_ be the first home because you'll still be at work and _I'll_ get to make you dinner. I want to see you pregnant and I want to see all the stages: I'm a fat ugly cow, I want a sandwich at four in the morning, I'm going to cry over everything and anything. I want to have a family with you, I want to screw up a kid with you or maybe do a really top-notch job of it. I want to see you cry when our kid goes to Hogwarts. I want to see you cry even more at his or her's graduation ceremony. I want to see the happiness in your eyes when they go down the aisle themselves like we had years ago, and I want to see you holding our grandchild."

If lightning were to strike me down right now, I probably wouldn't feel it.

I can't feel _anything_. Everything is numb and I can hardly sense the beating of my own heart – lubdub, lubdub, lubdub – which is the only thing keeping me going at the moment. I can't even breathe; the neurons in my brain have officially stopped moving because _everything_ has stopped moving. I want to cry and scream and jump up and down and _faint_, all at the same time.

I want to scream to the heavens above that I love the man standing in front of me, I want to cry because I'm such a _girl_, I want to jump up and down because everything he just told me, everything he wants, I want it too and have for a while, I want to faint because this is practically too much for my poor soul to handle.

"But how can you want these things too, Lily?" He's speaking again, even though the words are wrong, so out of place, negative. "How can you go from _hating me_ to leaving this place _with me_?" He gestures wildly around us, up towards the school. "You can't, it's impossible."

"James, you – you don't know what you're saying, just – "

"I thought long and hard about this. I do, I _do_ know what I'm saying."

Resentment, pure bitterness, has surmounted in the few moment's since everything had been _okay_. My mind wildly searches for the right words to comfort him but everything is blank, a canvas of nothing that after every second seems to encompass more and more of my very being.

I am rendered useless, silent, stunned.

"I _love_ you," James continues steadily. "I love you so much. But I refuse to leave this place knowing that one day you're going to wake up and see the mistake you've made. You'll look through me and force yourself to see that arrogant, pompous, 4th year me, the one you hated. I can't go through that."

He grabs his broom off the ground and I fight for self-control. "James, stop!" I grab his arm tightly.

"Please, just listen to me. You're not thinking straight, I don't know why, but this," I point between us, "this is the _best_ I've ever had. I want to do all those things with you, I do. I want to graduate with you at my side and get jobs and buy a house, or a flat, and go out for dinner with you and on Fridays we can get together with our friends, and I want to have Sirius constantly over at our place simply because he can't stand being away from you for more than a few hours, at most."

His arm, tense at first to my touch, relaxes in my grip. James studies me for a second, uncertain, before he exhales. "I don't – can't, have anything happen to you. Maybe… maybe you'll find someone better equipped to protect you."

Outraged, my brain is quick to tell me that I can't let him walk away, leaving this plainly unfinished. But when I feel him brush by me, instinct takes over.

Turning, I dig around my pocket for my wand. Pointing it squarely at his retreating, hunched back, I ignore what he's just said and focus on all the wants and close my eyes tightly.

And then, with everything in me, using every viable neuron, with gusto and faith, I shout two clear words into the drizzle that has started up again.

"_Expecto Patronum_!"

* * *

Perhaps a little overdone with the rain, but you know what? I had to. Cheesy, probably. Fun to write, you know it. Review?


	7. Privacy

Well, folks, thank you for sticking through this and leaving all your pretty, lovely, endearing, supportive reviews! This is it; I'm vaguely considering a sequel, maybe from James' view, but I don't know, depends. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Hope you like it!

_Disclaimer: Nothing is miiiiine, nothing is miiiiine, I wish I had Jaaaaames, la la la laaaaaaa._

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**Chapter 7 – Privacy**

As a child, when rain fell and lightning split the sky in half, thunder reverberating in my parent's house, I'd pull off the blankets of my bed and wrap myself up like a swaddled baby. I would slip underneath my bed and stay there until I was sure that God had stopped bowling and flickering with what I imagined was a gigantic light switch beside him.

That's what I did when I was frightened, afraid.

But at this moment, watching in slow-motion as the light bursts from the tip of my wand – Willow, 10 1/4", swishy – and begins to form a corporeal form, the outline I had produced over and over a week ago just so that I knew I could do it again, in this exact setting, I realize that being frightened and afraid, it was _driving_ me this time.

The magnificent doe's tiny feet land on the damp grass at the precise second when James turns, probably mystified as to why I had shouted the incantation. She – the doe – canters forward towards him and in the light stemming from her body, I can see his eyes are wide, disbelieving, yet realizing at the same time.

All my thoughts and mental strength is funneled into keeping the doe going, keeping her as bright as she was when she leaped out of my wand. Leaving behind a curious glittering mist in her wake, the doe trots in a large circle around James, bowing her head and considering him with such inquisitiveness that he seems drawn towards her and stares right back.

"This…" He grapples for balance as the doe continues to walk slowly, deliberately around him. "This is – is..."

"Interesting?" I suggest, watching the doe step up closer to James, sticking out her nose and sniffing him wearily. "If you don't know what _this_," I indicate madly at the animal, "means, you're a bloody idiot, James Potter."

With my focus teetering, the doe fades slightly, still sniffing at James' Quidditch robes as he watches in bizarre fascination. Finally, I relinquish all control and the two of us watch as she fades into thin air, the warmth that she had brought me fading as well and reminding me that we're still standing in the glum mist.

"You don't get to decide whether or not somebody _loves_ you," I tell him shortly. "You don't get to assume, you don't. For God's sake, we've been going out for eight months! What on earth makes you think I'm suddenly going to 'see the light' and leave you? My entire life I've been handed the short end of the straw, James. Shadowed by my sister, who proceeded to dub me a freak, befriended by somebody who turned out to be somebody _entirely_ different, being a filthy mudblood – "

He cringes, opens his mouth, ready to berate me for using the term.

" – oh c'mon, James. I'm a mudblood and immensely proud of it, because I haven't stepped down, I've stood _up_."

Unrefined intensity and emotion pumping through my blood like an antidote, I walk forward, stowing my wand back in my pocket. "And I will continue to stand up, I won't back down. I'm not backing down now, am I? You could resort back to your old ways and I'd still be 140 percent in love with you. I might get mad and hex you, but I'd still be head over heels in love."

The words are hitting him like bullets, except rather than inflicting harm, they loosen him, cause his shoulders to sag more and more, make the corners of his mouth to rise higher and higher.

"I don't need somebody to stand in front of me through everything, protecting me. Not all the time. Just," I reach out and grab both his hands, bringing them up to my chest, holding them tightly, "I just need you to love me. And I need you to continue to look at me like I'm the only woman on the face of the planet, look at me without seeing that I'm different from the rest. You can't fight this," I smile, "because you and I both know it: my Patronus is not just a fluke."

"I don't want to lose you. _Ever_." His voice is so quiet that it is almost lost in the surroundings. "I'd never be able to – to move on."

"Luckily for you, that's not going to happen." I don't know this for a fact; the future isn't a guarantee, after all, but this is what James needs to hear and I'm going to stick with this, because as far as I'm concerned, I plan on dying old and gray with a plethora of grandchildren, too.

"Things happen – "

"_Love_ happens. Now shut up," I move closer, so close that I can feel his breath on my skin, "and kiss me like you mean it."

But instead of moving his head forward and down, James releases the grip on one of his hands and brings his fingers to my face, tracing the curve of my bottom lip. Then, both of his hands coming up to cup my face, holding me there, he presses his forehead against mine and squeezes his eyes shut.

"I won't let anything happen to you, Lily Evans, I swear it. I love you."

When his eyes open and meet mine, the power of his gaze causes the tears that have collected in the wells in my eyes to spill over, sliding slowly towards his fingertips on my cheekbones. I let out a gasp of a laugh and bring my own fingers to his, clutching them firmly.

"I'm pretty much in love with you, too."

When James kisses me – slow, sensual, with all the time in the world – I can just imagine the sky release over us, a constant downpour, nothing like what emptied out earlier, drenching us to the very bone. But it never comes; instead, the warmth that I had felt while my Patronus was in its form returns to me.

As his hands slide from my wet cheeks down to the soft slope of my neck, slipping over my shoulders and running down my back, soothing circles, bringing me up against him, I wish that time would just stop.

I'm not sure my heart has ever felt so… _satisfied_.

--

"Who's the superhero who wears his undies outside his pants? And in the comics he's unbelievably hot."

"Underwear Man." Peter promptly collapses sideways on the couch in the most outrageous giggles; he's never held his liquor very well.

I have no idea where James disappeared to – no doubt to find Sirius before he could do anything his inebriated mind would regret later tomorrow, but I'm stuck here, squashed between two drunks: Peter, whose toosh is now dangerously close to my hand (I sneak it onto my lap without any touching) and Joelle, who is almost as equally smashed.

"His name is Spiderman," I correct Peter unnecessarily, but the answer is lost on Jo because she's suddenly become fond _of her own foot_.

"You know," she says, peeling away her flats and wiggling her toes out into the air. I try not to pay notice to the amount of attention we're suddenly receiving. "I always knew you and James were going to shack up."

"Shack – shack up?"

"Yeah, you know, live together after school and whatnot," Jo clarifies, before twisting on her arse so that she can lay her legs across my lap, her feet snugly resting on Pettigrew's hip, still exposed in the air.

Perhaps he's fallen asleep in that slumped over position…

"What a vulgar term to use, Jo. Shack up? I prefer love each other with every molecule of our beings."

"You're a _sap_," Joelle declares, pulling her best I'm-so-disgusted expression, except aiming it directly at her constant wiggling toes.

I chuckle at the absurdity of all of this: compacted in between two less-than-sober individuals, what has become of my life? That is a silly question though, because I've never felt so content in the seventeen years I've spent gracing this planet.

"OY, EVANS!"

I jump ten feet off the couch and crane my neck round, seeing where my surname was shouted in a muddled fashion. Having entered the Gryffindor common room moments ago, Sirius was now attempting to make his way over towards the couch except he kept stumbling and was being awkwardly supported by James and Remus, who seem deep in conversation across Sirius.

"Drunk as a skunk," Joelle says, having looked over too. She's hardly one to talk.

Sirius rids himself of James and Remus' helping hands and catapults himself over the arm chair next to the couch, now standing in front of me, swaying just slightly. "I told you there was more to it!" He points a finger at me, adamant on proving that he was the savior of our relationship.

"James?" The back of his thighs knock against the coffee table as he tries to remain poised. "James? Are – are you going to do it?"

"Do what?" slurs Peter from my other side, cheek flattened against the armrest.

"Blimey, Padfoot. You're going to kill yourself if you drink much more. I trust you'll watch him, Moony?"

Lupin sighs and motions for me to get up. Confused, I lift up Joelle's legs and hold them in the air, wondering briefly whether I'll be able to fall back down onto the couch but then it becomes clear when Remus grabs a book off the table. He grabs hold of the legs and then falls in between Jo and Peter's arse.

"Have fun," he winks, as at the exact same moment Sirius topples over the table with something like a squeal.

James offers me his hand with somewhat of a mischievous smile. Concerned and excited at the same time, I clasp my palm in his and we meander our way through the partygoers, up the stairs to his old dorm, the dorm the other three Marauders still inhabit, now with Frank.

"What, you don't want to get wasted?" I ask teasingly as I close the door behind us.

"Nah," he smiles, raking a hand through his hair and glancing around his old dormitory. "I'd rather be sober for this."

It takes me a second to come to the most likely conclusion: raising my eyebrows, I smirk in interest and slight amazement. "Really, James, _here_? I thought maybe the privacy of our own common room, you know, or maybe your current room…"

Laughing, James gives me a playful look and presses a chaste kiss to my lips, scraping another hand through his hair and that's when I know he's nervous.

"James?" I step forward and snugly wind my arms around his waist. "Have I mentioned how much I love you?"

This brings the biggest, silliest of smiles to his lips that I can't help but kiss persistently, deeply, nothing like on the Quidditch pitch. He's unresponsive at first, but then dominates it, backing me up against the closed dormitory door.

Blissfully engaging in probably one of the most passionate kisses we've exchanged, James' hands skim up my side slowly. I feel his tongue tentatively against my lips and greedily, as much as I hate to admit it, I part my lips in reaction.

Far too fast and before we really realize it, things have progressed past the point of familiarity: I've unbuttoned the simple white pressed shirt he had thrown on before coming to the party and his hands are dangerously high on my torso, his fingertips _thisclose_ to grazing the underside of my bra.

Still caressing my stomach, James pulls away from my aching lips and rests his forehead against mine again. I'm pressed against the door even more but really, I don't want to be anywhere else at the moment.

"We – we don't have to," he whispers practically into my mouth.

I take his hands and bring them out from underneath, enfolding his fists in the material of my shirt, my implications clear. "I want," I whisper teasingly against his lips before dragging my own from the corner of his mouth, across his cheek up towards his ear.

His head falls into my neck, nestles there, as I playfully tug on his earlobe, my shirt still scrunched up in his grip.

"You know we can't do it here," he laughs into my shoulder.

"I know. So take us somewhere else, you big poof."

He lifts his head and smiles, moving his hands away from my shirt and pulling it down properly again. I button back up his shirt, unfortunately hiding that delicious chest of his that I am simply dying to run my fingers over again.

"Pretend like – like…"

"Like we didn't just totally make out in your best mates' room? Alright."

We leave the dorm and tiptoe down the staircase, worried a certain Drunk Sirius Black might corner us. But as we try to dart across the common room, I see him making out with somebody on the armchair he propelled himself over a few minutes ago. With a bolt from the blue, I realize he's making out with none other than Joelle.

Oh, she will definitely hear about this all the way to her death bed.

--

"Are you sure you don't have anywhere else to be?"

"You're a sly, cruel minx, you know that?"

I laugh pleasantly, stepping into James' bedroom and kicking the door shut behind me. "I know, and yet here we are, in your bedroom. Alone." I lean back, arms folded over my chest, surveying James.

"Indeed we are, Miss Cleverness."

"James?"

"Lily?"

"Undress me before I go find somebody who will."

I see a flash of humor and jealousy across his eyes. With a surprised shriek on my part, he grabs me by the hips and lifts me up and away from the door, kissing me in the same desperate, passionate fashion as before, our tongues already dwelling a fight that I've only participated in with a few select guys.

James holds me to him tightly, chest to chest, stomach to stomach, my hands running wild across his strong back, feeling the muscles heave and stretch underneath his shirt. Merlin, this is _so_ incredible.

Instinctively, my legs wrap around his waist and bring us closer, the friction eliciting a garbled moan from my lips. This is way past the point of no return. So far over the line, but I don't want to even _think_ about going back, let alone look.

We're falling onto the bed far sooner than we both probably thought, James pinning me against the mattress and the sheets of a bed – there's a permanent aroma of soap, wood chips and James on the layers – and his lips marking a path down from my mouth to my collarbone.

"James, love," I whisper into the darkness, fighting the prevailing feeling of longing and passion that's rising from the depths of my toes. "Did you – did you, uh, want to talk to me about something?"

My shirt is gone before I can even acknowledge that his hands were under there again.

"No," he answers against the rising and falling of my chest, placing feathery kisses there. "No talking."

--

When I fell asleep, I was thinking of the moments before where never in my life had I felt so connected – physically, emotionally, mentally – to somebody. I was thinking about the marks on my body James had made with a sneaky grin, the half moon scratches on his shoulders from my nails, the way our voices and sounds had molded together.

When I wake up, I want to experience it all over again. But the arm that had been slung around my waist was gone and when my hand slides to the other side of the bed, I find I'm the only occupant.

"James?" I call softly, wondering whether he's in the bathroom but the door is open and the moonlight is trickling in. I glance at the clock – two o'clock in the morning – and then sit up, drawing the thin sheet around my naked body.

As I try to adjust it so that it's a toga of sorts, something catches my attention, something placed majestically on his pillow, looking innocent and yet causing my heart to freeze and restart at a much faster pace. My shaky fingers pick up the item, inspecting it with wide eyes, my lips parted.

I leap off the bed, fiddling with the top sheet and wrapping it tightly around myself, holding it with one hand to my chest so that it remains closed around my frame, the other hand clenched around the simple object.

My shawl drags on the steps when I rush down them in my bare feet. The thing feels suddenly heavy in my hand, heavy and big and significant.

The fire is a dull roar now, barely alive, but James is: sitting on the couch, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped in the air, apparently deep in thought.

"What – what is this?" I ask wildly.

He doesn't react at all, just sits there.

"James – _this_ – holy Merlin – oh my _God_ – "

I hear him chuckling and stop freaking out long enough to glare at him with everything I've got. "James William Potter, if you don't – don't say something I'm going to – to punch you!"

"You know I'm awful at saying what's on my mind," he teases, leaning back against the couch and smiling at me, taking in the badly arranged dress I've created around my self.

I walk closer, nearly stumbling on the material, and sit down next to him, searching his face, his eyes. "James…"

"I contacted your parents _weeks_ ago," he mutters bashfully, rubbing a hand through his hair. "They've probably been awaiting a letter from you telling them the good news, but then I just started thinking, you know, about everything… and I never ended up doing it."

I'm feeling really woozy. I'm totally going to faint, collapse right there on the couch, probably fall forward and crack my head on the edge of the table, because I'm just a really embarrassing person and James will have to rush me to the hospital wing because I'd be loosing so much –

"I had it with me in Hogsmeade," James continues, staring at my clenched fist. "I thought about doing it but… I don't know." He sends me a grimace. "You know your boyfriend a complete twat."

I alternate staring between my clenched hand and James, who is now looking at the very nearly extinguished fire.

"Fiancé," I whisper quietly.

"What?" Apparently he hadn't made out what I had said.

I clear my throat and sit a little straighter, a little bit more confident. "Fiancé," I repeat louder. "You said 'you know your boyfriend is a complete twat'… fiancé. My fiancé is a completely twat."

I open my palm like a flower blooming and extend my hand to him, the diamond ring sitting there between us. James stares at it and then my face: maybe he seems something in it, or my eyes, or just _knows_, because he peeks down at the ring again and picks up.

He grins that Marauder grin and asks quietly, slowly, "Will you marry me?"

I almost answer back but I stop myself, blinking and then smiling roguishly.

"Sorry, try again," I say, the words echoing like a mantra in my head.

"What the heck does that – oh!"

Sliding off the couch, I realize he's in nothing but boxers – it hadn't registered simply because perhaps I had bigger things on my mind than what state he was in when I came downstairs. Smiling somewhat nervously, he kneels down and takes one of my hands.

"Lily Evans, woman in the bedding, will you marry me?"

I giggle, bite my lower lip and then bob my head up and down rhythmically while shrieking, "Yes!"

The moment the ring adorns my finger, James kisses me, hard and long, cradling me back against the cushions. The sheet slips slightly around me when I abandon it and run both hands across his shoulders, burying them in his messy hair afterwards, to keep him there.

I remember being so afraid to show my Patronus, then being so angry about the wizarding world, and then being so pissed off, feeling so neglected.

But it was worth it, I tell myself. It's so worth it. I find 'sorry, try again' is no longer my life motto.

When James lifts me up into his arms, supporting me bridal-style, I cuddle myself into his chest. This feels so right, so _perfect_.

"I love you," I whisper to him, well aware that I'm drifting off as he climbs the stairs.

"The feeling is quite mutual, _Mrs. Potter_."

* * *

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